My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift.
In an essay for Gorse, Fernando Sdrigotti writes about how the act of writing is pointless and masturbatory, using an idea from Borges’s “The Library of Babel”, that of “ordered totality,” as a jumping-off point for calling writers “either optimistic or seriously stupid.” Inflammatory, yes, but the piece begs conversation with its closing thought: “Writing is useless and impossible to justify in a reasonable way.”
