Our good friend, David Grayson, has a profound thought about writing:

I suspect there are higher purposes in writing than our own enlargement, our own release, our own comfort--but a writer of necessity writes what he is and what he must. Let it go at that! Even some men on fire with a passion for objective truth, I suspect, write to release thoughts that might otherwise burst them. The scientist expresses his mind as the poet his creative passion: but it is a mark of all great writing, of whatsoever kind, that it somehow release the soul of man: the poor caged spirit seeking in the beauty of the world, or in the lives of the brave and noble of the past, some balm for the brevity of life, some friend for the loneliness of it. The little soul that we are, carrying about a corpse (as Marcus Aurelius says), yet singing a little each day, yet enjoying the hills and the trees--forgetting for a moment the past--ceasing for a moment to think of the future--is there not something beautiful about that?

The Countryman's Year

# posted by Luis @ 8:39 PM