How to Lose Friends and Influence
People
It's been just about a half-year now since I
started this little essay-writing hobby. It grew out of a request
from the editor of an English-language weekly newspaper here in
Tokyo, who had seen some of the newsletters I had been sending to
collectors of my woodblock prints, and who thought that one of the
stories from that newsletter would be suitable for her publication. I
was pleased by the request, and happy to edit the story to the proper
length and style she requested. After it appeared, she suggested that
if I wished to contribute more, she would consider them for potential
publication. I did, and she started to use them, one every couple of
months.
When I asked her about the themes and topics she
wanted to see, her reply surprised me a bit; "Anything you want to
write about," she said. Although this was a bit disconcerting at
first, to be faced not only with a blank word processor screen, but
with no hint at all about what to put on it, I soon got used to the
idea, and have been enjoying myself tremendously, creating these
little pieces. One reason for this was that during the previous few
years, I had 'lost' my hobby, and had buried myself perhaps a bit too
deeply in my work. Back when I was a 'salaryman' in Canada, my hobby
had been woodblock printmaking, but that had now become my job, and I
had done nothing to replace it ... So I was quite ready to spend time
on something totally unrelated to printmaking, and indeed, very few
of the essays have been in any way related to that topic.
There is another reason why I have taken so well
to this writing, although it feels a bit funny to verbalize it now.
For a couple of years prior to this, I had been living pretty much
alone. Of course, I physically live here with my two daughters, and
we get along very well together, with lots of contact and
communication, but I undeniably feel a lack of 'intelligent' adult
companionship. The printmaking work, being a manual craft, is hardly
the sort of thing to overly tax one's mind, and I suppose that this
is why I expanded the work to include things like the newsletter - to
add an intellectual dimension to the job. But during the day, and
into the long quiet evenings, as I sit there at my benches, carving
and printing, my mind is pretty much free to roam.
And roam it does. Although I spend a good deal of
the time with the stereo system turned on, listening to radio
programs or to various types of music, it still insists on wandering
away. Sometimes I wish I were back programming computers again, so it
would be forced to behave itself and stay 'at home'. Where does it
go, you ask? Well, that's the problem, and that's why I'm glad to be
involved with this essay hobby, in order to give it something
sensible to focus on. Because more and more, I had been finding
myself falling into the 'Walter Mitty' habit.
Have you ever read the 'Secret Life of Walter
Mitty', that short story by James Thurber? I remember first
encountering it back in high school. Walter Mitty is a little
nondescript man, who escapes from his humdrum daily life every chance
he gets, by retreating into imaginary situations. As he stands
outside a shop, for example, waiting for his wife to come out, the
scene is transformed in his mind into a hero standing against a wall,
facing a firing squad ... Every activity in his mundane life becomes,
in his mind, a heroic situation. Every moment that his brain is not
actually engaged in overt activity, he slips away into this private
world.
Now whether it is influence from Thurber's story,
or as I suspect is more likely, that everybody does this sort of
thing sometimes, I had been emulating Mr. Mitty during my carving
hours somewhat more than I'd care to admit. But since I took up essay
writing, I am pleased to report that I now spend a lot less time in
front of firing squads, and a lot more time in a rather more
productive (and certainly less embarrassing) form of activity -
thinking!
As much fun as the essay writing has turned out to
be, one thing that has surprised me is that there is a dangerous side
to it. Of course, I don't mean physically dangerous, things like
eye-strain from the computer screen, or wrist problems from overuse
of the keyboard, but rather, dangerous to my relationships with
friends and acquaintances. It comes from the fact that my essays are
mostly of a 'familiar' type, making their point (where there is a
point to be made ... that is!) from an episode or happenstance from
my own experience. Or sometimes, from the experiences of those people
near to me.
Now I'm sure it didn't bother him overly at first
to see the phrase 'my friend Terry ...' in an essay of mine, but my
friend Terry must have started to have misgivings after it started to
crop up more often. He must have started to think, "This guy isn't
interested in me, but only in ideas for his essays. I'd better be
careful what I say, of he'll write about it and tell everybody ..."
No friendship can long survive such a situation. The problem is
perhaps even more marked in the case of female friends, and one
budding relationship was nearly destroyed recently, when the lady
found out what I was doing with my time. It is obviously a slippery,
and very steep slope - this business of using personal friends'
experiences as source material for writing. At first, I hadn't been
concerned about this at all; I just simply assumed that friends would
share my willingness to be 'open' about personal things, in the
interests of communication and discussion about human problems, but
now that I've become more aware of their feelings on this, I'll watch
my step much more carefully. (Do you hear me, S-san? This is the
first and last time you will ever appear in one of these pieces ... I
promise!)
Will my essays now become less interesting,
without this source of input? Perhaps. But I'm not worrying too much
about that just yet. My memo listing of topics waiting to be covered
has more than a hundred items on it at the moment, and it's still
growing faster than I can chew away at it! It's not that I've lived
for 43 years, and will now spend the next 43 writing about these
experiences, but that the two activities, living and writing, will
now proceed together hand-in-hand.
So relax, Terry. Although your name may still
appear from time to time in these pages, it will only be there in
connection with a 'point of departure', a start to a chain of
thinking. The 'private' thoughts that will be exposed will be mine
alone. Now let's see ... where did I leave that old overcoat
...?