vanity, vanity...

Ok, so it seems like the old old question has not gone away: What's the point of all this, anyway? i lost my faith in literature several years ago; for a time, i even thought that i was going to stop investing my time and energy in it altogether, that i was going to give it up forever (barring the reading of the occasional novel or poem, just for the fun and heck of it).  It was quite a surprise to find myself going back to it -- and this time, not as a scholar or teacher, but as a practitioner -- someone who actually makes literature. And for a time, the sheer enjoyment of it, the sense that this thing, more than any other thing, was the thing i was put on earth to do -- was enough to keep me going, to make me go to extraordinary lengths to arrange my life to make time and space for it, to make me think, This is my calling.
.
But faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. And the absence of faith -- takes away any long-term basis for hope, means that you have no vision of what you want. i think this is at the heart of all this angst of the last few weeks or even months. The fact that i am not convinced that the kind of writing i want to do will make any sort of useful impact on the world around me. i don't see the point of it. That explains the feeling of emptiness, the sense that all the achievement in the world is not going to mean anything, ultimately. The thrashing about wondering which way to go. How am i to go on choosing this path if i don't even think that what i'm doing has any real ultimate value in the first place?
.
Living in a society that doesn't value reading and literature doesn't help. People don't see the value of what you do; and, more fundamentally, few people read enough for what you do to even have the chance of making any kind of impact. Writers want their work to touch lives, to even change lives, if possible; but if people don't see reading as a worthwhile activity ......

A friend asked me recently, in response to my observation that literary writing makes you no money here in Singapore (and very little money even in other places... but at least elsewhere, you have things like literary journals that pay when they publish your work), why this fact-of-life bothered me so much, when i claim at the same time that i don't write for the money. Well, the answer is pretty clear if you think about it: because money is the currency used to measure value in our society. And the fact that people won't pay for literature means, simply, that they don't value it, or that they value it less than other things that they do pay for -- which, in this life of limited resources, is often the practical equivalent of not valuing it at all. i challenge anybody to show me a human being who does not want his/her work to be meaningful, purposeful, and valued by other people.
.
Well. So where does that leave us. At least, i now know what the problem is. i'm not sure what to do about it. Unless someone actually comes up to me and tells me that something i've written has changed his or her life......
.
.