"Oh, the Noise! Noise! Noise! Noise!"

Another point my writer-friend mentioned that struck a chord in my heart was the idea of noise and specifically whether we should be adding to it.  That is a question I have often asked myself on a conscious and subconscious level.

There is so much writing out there on the interweb.  People have written so many blog posts that you could spend decades reading them.  Then there are all the online messages, email correspondences, magazines, good old-fashioned books, and on and on....  Every now and again I try to catch up on my reading and I realize how futile it is.  I will never be able to read enough.  Maybe if I could get a job reading it would be possible, but the odds of finding someone to pay me to do such a thing are about as good as being able to build an amazing full-size schooner solely out of toothpicks.

All that potential seems overwhelming.  It begins to feel just like noise.

So why in the face of such noise should I do anything that might add to it?  After all it seems a little presumptuous to assume that I could contribute something of substantial enough merit to warrant the effort.

Yet who am I to say that I have not the competence?  We are not actually very good judges of ourselves or our own skills.  As Sir Thomas More put it in Robert Bolt's wonderful play A Man For All Seasons: "This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made."  He then goes on to become precisely that despite his best efforts to save his life and still remain true to his conscience.

Why should we not be equally poor prophets of our own future?  We may say that our writing is futile, that it is like dry shriveled leaves tossed about in the wind or some other suitably melancholic metaphor, but how do we know that it will not move someone's heart?

We like to think that we are good judges and that we know what will come of our work.  Yet many authors scorn the works that we consider their masterpieces.  It is a strange paradox.

It is almost as if there is some other power at work....