A curious convergence today caused me to read two items on the same subject from greatly different locations. Literary agent Rachelle Gardner today posted to her blog an article titled The Lonely Life of the Writer. Her point is that, since the largest part of the world doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a writer or to seek publication, the writer is pretty much alone in those pursuits.

Then, looking for something to print and read during the lunch hour, I went to the Carlyle Letters On-line, pulled up a month in a target period for which I want to know more about Carlyle’s thoughts and pursuits, and I found this in a letter he addressed to a friend from his home town.

Zimmermann has written a book which he calls ‘the pleasures of solitude’: I would not have you to believe him: solitude in truth has few pleasures, uninterrupted solitude is full of pain.

So the solitude of the writer’s life is a converging subject in those two reads. Solitude can mean different things, however. As Rachelle Gardner used it, it was not being alone physically but being not understood by those we are around. Carlyle seems to mean it as the physical, though he quite possibly could mean either one or both.

Continuing in Carlyle’s letter, I find this interesting continuation of his thoughts.

But solitude, or company more distressing, is not the worst ingredient of this condition. The thought that one’s best days are hurrying darkly and uselessly away is yet more grievous. It is vain to deny it, my friend, I am altogether an unprofitable creature.

This reminds me of John Wesley’s statement in a letter to a woman friend, early in his life, about he feared passing through this life and not leaving his mark. Carlyle echoes this.

Perhaps this is a feeling more widespread among those who pursue the creative arts than I figured upon first discovering that Wesley quote. The time it takes from the decision to produce a written work that one hopes will impact the world until the time it actually does impact the world, a time of solitude of mind if not of body, is huge. No matter how short it may be it will seem long. Our words designed to entertain or inform reach no one for the longest time.

I have no real conclusion for this, no take-away value for the reader. Count this as a journal entry of an observer of his own writing life.