The Coffee Shop

                  

          At the coffee shop where I sit at an isolated table I see several people, like me, using a pen and paper, and writing. This activity is what is left of a literary world that made all of our best thinking paramount. Good writing was never about what everyone wrote down on paper. It concerned writing down and editing, writing down and editing, on ones own, until the words had clarity that the writing down produced. But it was not a single act of pouring out words like water splattering into a sink.

            The act of writing, however, had a significance. It meant that someone was trying to do something that was important in all educated minds. It was not the idle journaling that so many people call writing today.

            It was dealing with a love of words that expressed thoughts more than emotions. The thoughts expressed the emotions; the emotions did not express the thoughts.

            I feel the last of a literary world that I hardly understood when it thrived. It was an unquestioned way of life. It was important. We thought it was permanent.

            But writing gets soggy when it becomes everyone’s pastime and a means of getting down things. It has become conversation, like the spoken word.