LETTERS 

The writer always told people he was a writer but never said, for sure, what kind. He wanted a little more evidence to filter in. He thought the writers life should be obscure. Nothing should be known about it. It is what the writer makes it to be through his talents. The rest is silence. As sport the writer observed the daily vanity, its collective vanity, with its vain personalities troupe across the stage and estimated how long it would be before they fell or got ripped apart by the resentment of the crowds.

This was difficult to maintain when women were around. He admired women for their playfulness and imaginations. He loved women for their kindness and compassion. But always, after awhile, they demanded that he enter their fears and obsessions; their natures and what was not their nature. 'I only, dear woman, go toward what oppresses my work. Isn't it natural and in the spirit of the finest battle to race toward what oppresses your love?' It was never enough for the woman who wanted the writer to submerge himself into the crowd. 'You're no better than those who you criticize all the time.' He knew that to be true. But then, the goals were different. And the goals meant everything. And the writer formulated his goals when he was in a state of utter relation to the few things that counted. And when one of the people perceived his goals they would formulate a plan of attack. The writer had taken to laughter rather than sex to please himself.

Whenever the writer felt he was a good man his cousin would show up from back east. His cousin was a doctor and had a nearly perfectly shaped brain. He knew a great deal and expressed himself without a flaw. He had had wide and rich experience throughout the world and dismissed his home town with contempt. He had become part of the eastern crowd and was fast talking, highly opinionated but, all told, as perfect a developed man as one could imagine. His cousin was the fulfillment of a type. Even after the cousin excoriated the writer for self-complacency he parted with this bit of advice: 'People who go after you the most for the goals you have, have destroyed their own.'

David Eide
September 6, 1999
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