Truth in Writing

The students in English 1010 are working on their personal essays, which means personal essays are also constantly on my mind. I just had a conversation today in which I confessed that I believe that, in general, people are cruel, selfish, and petty. I wish it wasn't the case, but I have an unfortunate (and undoubtedly prideful) view that the average person is mediocre, and mediocrity breeds pettiness. People do not aspire to be great, to transcend this mortal coil, to create beauty and wisdom and fantastic thought, they....

But then something catches me off guard. It's a thought I hadn't expected, although I've heard it before. The thought is this: of all the essays I read, I can't help but feel for every single writer. I feel a connection, some slight touch, like the spark of electricity jumping between two wires. Even for the briefest moment, we touch, like strangers in a crowd who brush together and then feel our eyes meet. And for everyone, even for the kids who only want to write about how cool that game was, or for the ones who have to be there and can't be bothered to treat me like a person, I can't help but feel a little sympathy. A little compassion.

Writing is beautiful in that. More than any other medium, it transmits pure thought. It places me into the mind, the experience of the writer. Rather than capturing the objective truth, it captures one person's truth, one particular person's imperfect memory rather than a completely factual recollection of the past. And in that imperfect memory are housed all the fears, all the hopes of a real person. If a person misrepresents a situation, leaves out the things they fear or mourn, their own actions they wish they could forget, that is beautiful, because I can feel even in the absence that shame, that guilt, that grief. If the writer admits it, embraces it, presents it to me like a gift upon a cushion, it is beautiful, because, no matter what it is, it is so wrapped up in heartbreak and truth that I can't help but pity them. Even the ones who don't see how thoughtless, absurd, or even cruel they were implicitly admit their childishness, their lack of understanding, and I can't blame that, because they don't know what they did.

If we could all write and all read, all come to understand our own thoughts and the thoughts of all others, to live not in their shoes but in their minds and memories for the space of even a few brief pages, how could we ever have war? How could we allow poverty, misery, suffering?

(And then there are those who walk in and say, "I hate writing. It's so pointless." Bastards.)