Or why I write these columns placing a twice a month obligation on me, even on occasion repeating myself by producing two on the same word — “perfect.”
The answer is alarmingly simple.
I must be writing something; otherwise, I feel unmoored.
How so?
Because, I respond, I am profoundly a word person. I can only guess that my brain responds to words the same way a painter’s brain responds to color, or shape, or whatever it is that a visually based brain focuses or a musician’s audio conscious brain processes in the tones and rhythms it hears.
As a word person, of course, I can partially fill that need by reading as painters can visit an art museum or musicians attend a concert but there is also the shared urge to produce as well as to respond, to engage rather than only react to the stimuli, be it a song, a painting, or a sentence.
This focus on words made me a decent student of other languages, admittedly more on the reading rather than spoken level of interaction. I guess the part of my brain that responds to English words does so with equal facility whether heard or read. It doesn’t do as well with non-English words, probably from lack of experience. I recall sitting as a student in the three languages I studied and learning how to say “I don’t understand” in Spanish, “no comprendo,” “je ne sais pas” in French, and “ich verstehe nicht” in German whenever I would hear my name in one of those classes without having understood what followed my name. I could read in those languages decently well but never developed an oral facility in them.
On the other hand, English poses no such problem for me. In fact, my brain responds enthusiastically to words in my native language, not just comprehending them but also offering, unasked for, contextual or etymological details, and being unable to produce those on its own requires me to do the necessary research.
So all the above begins to explain why over the last half century I have always been writing something. My brain demands to be producing as well as responding to words. I can pinpoint a moment in my life when my brain took over and convinced me that my Sputnik error flirtation with engineering was a mistake and that I should do what my brain was comfortable doing, and I became an English major, then an editor on my college newspaper to which my brain nodded its agreement, and then perhaps was ecstatic when I became an English professor so I made a living dealing with words. If it could, my brain would have patted me on the back.
And so after more than half a century during which I have published seventeen books and a long list of shorter pieces, stories, poems, and articles I have managed to keep my word hungry brain relatively happy.
And finally, of course, there is a simpler, all-encompassing reason for my word focus: it is perfectly natural and predictable that we all enjoy doing that which we do well.
Reading and writing come easy to me, always have. But also, like many others, I have deliberately undertaken activities that do not come easy, so I did develop decent carpentry skills sufficient to build a deck or make a platform bed, activities born by a need to challenge myself to learn something new.
I could have lived comfortably without meeting those challenges.
They were optional.
Responding to language is not.
And thus, these columns.
Even two devoted to one interesting word, as in “perfect.”