2025-01-15

The idea is a threefold ouroboros:

   Live to write   -- by enriching your experience.
  Write to publish -- to share your testimony.
Publish to live    -- to embalm your words in memory.

In 2020-01, I think, a friend and I discussed our uncertainty about the
future: we could not stop climate change any more; we might be living on
the brink of a second Middle Ages without knowing. Defeatism trapped us.
Like Twenty One Pilots say in "Not Today": "I look outside, see a whole
world better off without me in it trying to transform it."

Then I remembered a scene from Michael Ende's Neverending Story: a lone
man sits silently far up in a tower and omnisciently writes down the
entire story as it is unfolding. Maybe that's it: deliver an account to
posterity. John Green says in "The Fault in Our Stars" that pain demands
to be felt. Maybe life and beauty demand to be witnessed.

One piece of advice says: when in doubt, choose what will make for the
better story. As Tennyson writes: "I am a part of all that I have met",
and vice versa. So polish your choices. As Guntram Vesper writes: "Wir
dürfen unser / Leben / nicht beschreiben, wie wir es / gelebt haben /
sondern müssen es / so leben / wie wir es erzählen werden".

Then don't let your pearls go to waste. Direct all of your writing
towards publication, either directly or in preparation. People try to
copy Luhmann's Zettelkasten idea nowadays -- its purpose was to prepare
a book. Do not copy Kafka's view of himself. Knowing that you must
testify will improve your life -- and extend it: https://sive.rs/getme