Years ago, I read in a literary assignment that to write is to bury. That to write is not only to create, but also to cover—because when something new is published, something else is quietly pushed further down, further out of sight.
By writing something and publishing it, you are effectively burying the works of others under the sheer volume of output, in the overproduction of words that everyone else is sharing with the public.
I could not forget it, even to this day. It comes back to me from time to time, the fact that the very achievement of someone’s goal to publish work could very well mean contributing to the madness of quantity in the literary world—that creation is the root of excess.
I remember it even more these days, when I am in the middle of deciding whether I should close this website altogether.
This site used to contain my travel blogs. But I stopped because, among several reasons, I just could not justify sharing my adventures when there is already an ocean-deep archive of the same experiences on the Internet.
What would I really be adding? Another version of the same place, the same feelings, the same story told again?
Shall I contribute more to global warming driven by heat from cloud storage and the Internet of Things?
What makes my work different from the rest that are already out there?
I could not, without good conscience, keep churning out work that is just going to be the same as the pile of work online, indistinguishable except for the author’s name attached to it.
So these days, when I actually want to write something, I give it more thought. Is this something that my readers would have already read dozens of times? Am I saying anything substantial, or just repeating in my own voice? Is this another travel blog that talks about the same top 10 things to do in a country? That talks about the same iconic attraction?
While I’ve stopped writing about my travel adventures, I have decided to keep this site alive for the purpose of sharing things like this: thoughts, ideas from years ago, even, that I don’t often find online.
And, to justify this privilege of maintaining my space in the cloud, I write here only from time to time. I tell myself that because I don’t write regularly anymore, at least on this website, then I am burying less work. That writing less might also mean taking up space more carefully.
I am contributing less to the digital space, and hopefully, that lets me enjoy the freedom of sharing text without being so guilty that I still am doing it.
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