It is Hard to Escape Them

By: Nick Tosches

The older we get, the more ghosts crowd and claim us. Death does not deter the dead from living on within us and around us. We are under their spell. The world becomes irrevocably haunted.

— Nick Tosches

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It creeps into us, this desperation, without our being quite aware of its nature, when we enter our fifth decade of life.

If we are fortunate enough to enter our seventh decade, its nature is clear to us. But society, thoughts of moral judgment, a sense of shame, even fear of public damnation and prison restrain us, and the growing compulsion devours most of us unslaked as we wend our way from life in silence and secrecy to our common end. Most of us. But I would not be one of them…

If I could not bear the truth, I could at least close my eyes in the comfort of a lie…

Most men believe their lives to be somehow distinguished from the rest. But their lives hold as little interest as they do meaning, and are worthy only of being extinguished.

As a writer I have encountered more of these men than I care to remember, indeed than I can remember. Though they do not read, except perhaps to graze on the mulch of an ill-written tabloid or the drivel on a handheld device or computer screen, they feel that writers might somehow be drawn to their drab and dreary tales of sameness.

It is hard to escape them. They know nothing, least of all themselves. They go from cradle to grave seeking something. What they seek means as little to me as they do. They are a source of tedium and acid reflux, nothing more…

Do not think that I am setting writers apart from this majority. Most of them, in fact, belong to it. But they are not writers to be read, or countenanced…

I myself did not read much anymore. And I wrote even less. In fact, I had not written a book in years. Nothing seemed to matter. I felt that there was nothing left to write. I was a poet without pen or drum. Approaching a blank page, or even thinking of doing so, I felt disoriented and abstracted and my nerves went raw.

Again and again I swore that I would stop drinking and resume writing. Again and again I drank. And when I did not, I sat and drank coffee and smoked and withdrew into myself. Yet I still called myself a writer when asked what I did for a living.

Maybe I still thought like a writer. Or maybe, as George Orwell said, all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy…

In the folly and self-torture of trying to say what cannot be said lies nothing but ruin. This is why the greatest of writers have in the end always forsaken words for silence. As George Steiner said: “The true masters are those who relinquish their vocation.”

It was Rimbaud who saw the light earliest, quitting the racket six days before his twenty-first birthday, to run guns and coffee in Africa. But it was Pound who put it best, after fifty-seven years’ work on his Cantos: “I have tried to write Paradise / Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise.”

Exceptional men do not hold their experiences to be out of the ordinary or of interest to anyone else. Unlike the trodden fungus-men, they are not so ignorantly and presumptuously self-absorbed.

They are nobody and they know it. They shun notice. They are exceedingly rare.

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You can find these fiery passages in Nick Tosches novel —Me and the Devil: A Novel