A fascinating story: “A stranger e-mailed saying he planned to kill himself. What was I supposed to do?”
The guy walked across the country in his twenties in order to have his story heard. Forty plus years later he’s teaching English in Japan, blogging and still writing books no one reads.
And then the day came when he had said everything he wanted to say.
Worth the read.
What’s a shame is that, in the age of short attention spans and constant updating, the writer will receive perhaps a momentary interest before fading immediately back into obscurity. WaPo writer Cynthia McCabe has done the author a service, but it’s a temporary one at best.
I tried reading a passage from the author’s blog, but it was too filled with annoying parentheticals. If this is a good sample of his writing style, it’s no wonder he never caught on. Self-publishing in free countries is subject to the merciless laws of the free market: if you don’t give the people what they want (and according to the article, the writer felt he had to give people what they needed, not what they wanted), you can’t expect the public to embrace you.
This is the paradox of being a scholarly introvert with authorial pretensions: you don’t want to deal with people; you have a distorted view of human nature and thus little idea of how to communicate properly; at the same time, you’re yearning to say something to the masses, but you keep shooting yourself in the foot.
The irony is that, according to the article, Dennis Williams was able to connect and communicate with people in his capacity as a teacher. He was getting through to people, but he somehow felt that his writing was more important than the influence he wielded as a teacher. Very sad that he judged an entire aspect of his life as meaningless and/or irrelevant.
Excellent insights, Kevin.
I think Williams was the kind of guy I would have enjoyed meeting and chatting with over a few beers. But I still may not have read his books. It’s is indeed a shame that that is all that mattered to him. “A Willy Loman with WiFi”. Ouch.
And I found this to be true as well: “No matter how rich or educated we become, we only have the 24 hours for each of us. And with everybody promoting themselves on every possible social network, all of us so desperate for eyeballs, myself included, with all of us living and dying by our click history, it is kind of an extreme and terrible example of everybody’s feeling of ‘Why aren’t you looking at me?’ ’’
But I expect perhaps more people were looking than Williams realized. I am often amazed at the regularity of my meeting someone who professes to follow my blog. With just a couple of exceptions, no one takes the time to leave a comment. But then, I am writing primarily for me and I don’t presume to have any profound message to share with the world.
I confess that as I read this story I thought of you, because of your walk and your writing. I also thought of Shawn Matthews, someone I only knew through his writing, who also chose premature silence through suicide. I was surprised at how much his death impacted me, a stranger.
Well, it’s a waste and a shame.