A Quiet Writer from the Silent Generation

"Maybe the secret lies in tension between the music’s downstream flow and memory’s upstream longing, in the human heart’s resistance to the current that bears us always onward."My dad left a blog behind with 23 posts written between 2006 and 2014. In 2014 he stopped writing, though there are a few drafts after this in which he was learning how attach and upload pictures.

In the beginning, like all rookie journalists, he wrote dozens of pieces each week, several a day. As time passed and his career advanced he got to choose his own assignments. He wrote fewer but more in-depth articles. Very late in his career he switched to editing, and then back to writing, always about someone else for someone else.

I can imagine that in a 35 year career writing for newspapers his love for writing, if not his love for the written word was tempered to the point that 23 posts in 6 years was just the right number for him. I wish that he had written more, but I'm very happy that what he left behind was well-considered and polished. I sometimes wonder if he did write more, maybe much more as he suggested in one post that he would be diligently writing for two hours each morning. I doubt it. If he was like me, and I tend to think that we were very much alike, after years of toiling for someone else he took control of his writing in the best way possible–by addressing the pace at which he wrote. Taking time and care to write only when the time was right and he had something to say. Even then I think he probably refrained from writing at times just to confirm that this was all on his terms. It was perfectly Paul and equally as reactionary as my own completely opposite impulse to write impulsively and prolifically, and without much to say.

I wonder what my kids and wife will think when they find my own prolific reserve of babble, and images after I am gone. Will they think I'm nuts? A hoarder of words and pictures? Will they be saddened by the things I have said and seen, by the time I've spent on pointless topics? Or will they feel relieved that I didn't burden them with this random stuff and instead spent my words more wisely, and took more important photos when in person?

The full quote from above, from an entry in which Paul was musing about an unexpectedly interesting piece of music he found on an old CD. ""Maybe the secret lies in tension between the music’s downstream flow and memory’s upstream longing, in the human heart’s resistance to the current that bears us always onward. We grasp and cherish the vivid particulars of our individual lives as we head inexorably for the ocean, like swirling leaves."

silent generation writers

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