Becoming The Overman

The following is a personal analysis written by C. Nicholas Walker of Roger Rosenblatt's professional essay, "I Am Writing Blindly," from Prose, p. 620, which describes the psychological need for people to write.

TO EVERY HUMAN BEING, PHYSICALLY, THERE is a beginning and an end. To every human being, physically, our cradle stands in the grave. But mentally and emotionally, human beings are known for their immortality. In fact, that is what makes us human. Roger Rosenblatt’s essay, “I Am Writing Blindly,” describes the literary need of humans to have a piece of immortality in their times of death, and is an honest representation of the need for humans to tell a story.

Rosenblatt remarks, “We exist by storytelling—by relating our situations.” He says that this existence is biological and impulsive, many times without thought or logic. When the last occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto wrote letters and poems and hid them in the walls of their homes, Rosenblatt declares this was out of compulsion, knowing their words would never be read. However, they did so not out of illogical compulsion, but out of hope, the belief that good people would read them and that, through those people, they would touch eternity (why else would they hid them in the first place?) In the first part of my epic tragedy, The Voice of the Bard, the narrator is telling his story from the ethereal realm between life and death, begging in the prologue that he not be left alone, that his story not go untold.

Rosenblatt also states that “communication is the soul and engine of democracy.” But now we ask ourselves, what makes democracy democracy? This, of course, is freedom, and what greater freedom is there than that of the human voice? Personally, one would not have a “soul,” by whatever definition one uses, if without the freedom of communication. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it crash, the question of whether or not it makes a noise is just as meaningless as is the fact that the tree ever existed in the first place.

Of course, the question comes now to, what does it mean to write blindly? In the song “Strawberry Fields Forever” by The Beatles, John Lennon sings, “Living is easy with eyes closed, / Misunderstanding [sic] all you see.” This is the case with most young writers, and especially those who don’t wish to be writing. In other words, writing without a purpose or a desire to understand what was once unknown is to write with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see (which, technically, is nothingness.)

When the Lieutenant Captain wrote the words, “I am writing blindly,” he meant it in the sense of blindness which all men possess, the blind darkness where one knows not what the future holds in store for them. When they know not whether their story will ever be heard, and they beg to not be left alone. When they taste the eternal freedom leave their lips, their soul, and fight to have it back. When they wish to see the world with eyes wide-open, if only for a moment understand it all, before feeling it slipping away. We are all writing blindly. Indeed, we are all living blindly in this sense. No one knows what lies beyond the beaten path; there is no fault in this. The desire of sight is the desire of fools, and I maintain that true wisdom is held with the deaf and the dumb.