There's a swell book that's out of print now. Maybe Seven Stories will bring it out again. It's called The Writer and Psychoanalysis by a man who's now dead named Edmund Bergler. He claimed he had treated more writers than anyone else in his field, and being that he practiced in New York, he probably did. Bergler said that writers were fortunate in that they were able to treat their neuroses every day by writing. He also said that as soon as a writer was blocked, this was catastrophic because the writer would start to go to pieces. And so I said in a piece in Harper's, or a letter I wrote to Harper's, about "the death of the novel": People will continue to write novels, or maybe short stories, because they discover that they are treating their own neuroses. And I have said about the practice of the arts that practicing any art—be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever—is not a way to make money or become famous. It's a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway.Vonnegut mentions the bounty on Salman Rushdie then jokingly offer a million-dollar reward for the killing of Microsoft's Bill Gates:
Gates is saying, "Hey, don't worry about making your soul grow. I'll sell you a new program and, instead, let your computer grow year after year after year..."—cheating people out of the experience of becoming.Rilke wrote about the dizzying effects of urban commercialism and consumer society a few decades earlier, and in jest I've suggested Rilke had warned against the effects of Facebook. You can read that here.
But you shouldn't. Instead, quit surfing. And write.
