I expect that the reason I worry about so many things has much to do with the reasons why I write. The essential quality of a writer is empathy. It is the ability to view a situation from the standpoint of another living creature and to feel what it would feel. This is also the essential quality of a worrier. He sees no distinction between what happens to him and what happens to someone else. Nor does he see a distinction between what is and what could be.
A she-dog with a warm home and soft-pillow doggie bed is stolen from her master and brought to a farm where dogs are raised for meat. The bitch dogs are impregnated and placed in tiny crates. The she-dog feels her puppies licking at her, but cannot turn to lick the faces of the children nursing at her teats. This deprives her of satisfying the most basic maternal instinct. She is depressed and confused and dies a lonely, meaningless death.
The writer does not need to have experienced a loss of this kind to write this story. He can put himself in the shoes of that she-dog and feel the sense of loss and pointlessness that she would feel; he can channel her frustration and anger. And it is of no consolation to the worrier that puppy dogs are not seized from their homes and raised in this way—they very well could be, as evidenced by the way man uses chickens and pigs for his eggs and meat. The worrier does not even find comfort in the fact that he is a man and not a dog. He could be a dog and suffering in this particular way. The possibility of this is all that matters.
At this moment in my life I am worried about whether I will succeed as a writer. I have managed to get my first novel published, but I hope to expand my audience beyond yentas, elderly liberals, and moribund baking societies. Someday, perhaps, more people will attend my reading than a showing of a videotape of a mime reading from his memoir. I am at that uncertain point in a writer’s career where he wonders whether he will be noticed or whether his book is fated for the ninety-nine-cent remainder shelf, its tattered carcass to be used as a doorjamb at the 7-Eleven.
Being a student of history does not help. I know how difficult it is to get something of quality published. I know that Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was turned down twenty-nine times, that Ayn Rand was told The Fountainhead was badly written and its hero unsympathetic, that Emily Dickinson only managed to publish seven poems during her lifetime. I know that an editor of the San Francisco Examiner told Rudyard Kipling, “I’m sorry, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” A reviewer rejected The Diary of Anne Frank because, he said, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the curiosity level.” To Poe, a reviewer wrote, “Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.” To Melville, regarding Moby-Dick: “This story is long and rather old-fashioned.” To Faulkner: “Good God, I can’t publish this.”
Diet books are published with impunity, but Orwell was told of Animal Farm, “It is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.A.” And of Lolita, Nabokov was informed, “This is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. The whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”
So I am worried.
Most immediately, I am worried about what I will write next and whether it will get published. Now I must acknowledge that in a very important sense its success would make no difference. It would not diminish my angst. Even if the next novel succeeds, I will imagine and drift into the state of misery and failure that I would experience in the absence of success. Just as I do not need the actual triumph to imagine the euphoria of a bestseller, so too I do not require utter failure to dwell in the emotional realm of the undiscovered, unappreciated writer. Furthermore, it is not as if the stories that I have told and want to tell have any particular significance. They are just a few among the infinite stories that could and will be told—some to be imagined and shared, some to be lived, some to be dreamed and forgotten.
So, why worry?
But this is how it is with worriers. It is a compulsion. I am even worried about worrying. Abundant empirical evidence suggests that worrying can adversely affect health and digestion. This really worries me. I’d like to get some relief, and the future me could provide it, if only he would tell me where my writing career is headed and how my mother is doing. I want to ask, but I worry that doing so will have problematic, if not disastrous, consequences for the universe.
Most of what I know about the ethics and implications of time travel comes from Star Trek, in particular the classic episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” written by Harlan Ellison and starring Joan Collins as Edith Keeler, the saintly operator of a soup kitchen in lower Manhattan. In the episode, Dr. McCoy jumps through a time portal and changes history by saving Ms. Keeler from a car accident. Her life spared, Keeler leads a prominent pacifist movement, earns an audience with FDR, and delays America’s entry into the war. This gives Hitler the edge he needs. Germany develops the first atomic bomb and history is changed. In the new time line, the Nazis win and the development of space travel and the flush toilet are substantially delayed. It is then up to Kirk and Spock to go back and set everything straight, which they do, but not without considerable heartache.
I fear that if I ask the wrong sort of question I may have the same sort of butterfly effect on history. I like flush toilets, and I can take or leave Joan Collins, but no one likes the Nazis.
I think I have a way to finesse the problem, though.
“How does the writing go?” I ask.
I regard this question as strategic and clever. I am asking what he is doing, as opposed to what he has done, thereby avoiding an intertemporal catastrophe.
“You mean do we have any success?”
The ruse is exposed.
“I suppose,” I say with trepidation.
“Not as much as you hope,” older me says. “But not as little as you fear.”
I look around the room. This is a direct enough answer, but history does not appear to be changed. I notice that my Diet Coke has a lime in it and not lemon as I asked. This could be a change since I did not pay careful attention to the fruit when the drink was delivered. It’s possible the waiter got it right and history has been altered. But, all things being equal, I think it is more likely the waiter made a mistake and history has remained the same. I am not sure why waiters think lemons and limes are interchangeable, but they do.
The fabric of the universe apparently intact, I am emboldened to ask another question.
“What are you writing now?”
My eyes betray me. They drop to the table. When they do not meet mine, I know that this means I am either about to lie or to deliver bad news.
“I don’t write anymore,” older me says.
If the sad expression and laconic answers to my questions had not told me before, I know now that something has gone wrong, terribly wrong with my life. For me writing, like worrying, is a compulsion. The desire to express myself to others, to write, is an integral and irrepressible component of who I am. I cannot imagine not doing it. Something horrible has happened.
The waiter arrives. The porcini tart is redolent and seductive, but I need to know then and there what the problem is. This is also how it is with worriers. We fret about so much that is beyond our control that when something manageable comes within our gravity we feel an irresistible urge to put a chokehold on it and pull it close.
“What is it?” I ask. “What have you come to tell me?”
Older me smiles thinly, no doubt because he recognizes my passion as his own. He remembers the need to get to the heart of every matter without delay. His sad eyes look down to the soup and then to me.
“It is Q,” he says. “You must not marry