The un-journaled life not worth living

For anyone pulling his or her hair out while staring at the blank horizon of writer’s block, I… For anyone pulling his or her hair out while staring at the blank horizon of writer’s block, I would recommend taking a trip to www.thisisawar.com.

Intended to be a comfort to those considering suicide, it makes its case for life through an index of articles ruminating on facets of everyday existence. In addition to serving as comfort, the Web site also has proven to be an invaluable reference in terms of showing me the sheer variety of angles from which one can examine any given subject.

The article that most significantly stands out is under the category “purpose.”

Anyone who’s seen “Jerry Maguire” knows about the memo that the title character concocts during one sleepless night as a means of combating his despair over the vapid nature of his job and his place in the world.

The memo — sorry, mission statement — urges his contemporaries to look beyond their materialistic desires and strive to conduct their business with honor and honesty. It wins Tom Cruise’s character admiration from his coworkers at the sports firm where he works. And it gets him fired, setting in motion his opening a new firm on his own terms.

While we hear bits of the memo during the film, I was surprised to find on the Web site the full contents of his declaration of independence — running a whopping nine pages. What is truly amazing about the article is the depth of what Maguire has concocted, riddled with inspiring anecdotes and failures that have propelled him down his broken road toward his search for redemption.

What is most remarkable about the quality of this piece is the fact that Cameron Crowe — the movie’s writer — poured his heart into it, knowing that it would never reach moviegoers; even if it were distributed to patrons entering the cinema, the pamphlets would quickly become a junkyard of tic-tac-toe games and scribbled phone numbers.

It didn’t matter to Crowe whether someone would praise him for these words — he knew that to get the main principles of the film, he had to understand what the heart of the film was. The writing wasn’t a means to an end — it was merely a beacon to help guide the way through a dark tunnel.

So it’s with some shame that I confess that the reason that I write this column is to give myself some motivation to keep writing, as I know well that, without the hope of a paycheck and a fear of editors’ wrath for not producing copy, I would never be able to come up with the time to pause from my scurrying through the maze of Oakland in search of cheese to reflect on the things that matter to me.

So if it could be said that sometimes writers can seem to be pontificating and naval-gazing instead of reporting on the world at large, it must be understood that writing is distinct from most aspects of life in terms of the impossibility of multitasking.

We can skim astronomy notes while working out on the elliptical and make Ramen while calling home, but in order to try to put down something meaningful on paper, it is necessary to block out all distractions.

What we can’t help are the things that bleed into our subconscious, preventing us from ever being truly objective or detached. We shouldn’t try to shrug off these voices as if they were hindrances. Rather, we should welcome them as insights that we would never know without periodically working out our intuitive muscles.

This is why it’s important to try at least once a week to put down something on paper that sums up how you are currently faring. Time alone may be remedy for depression, but the unexamined life is equally despairing.

What’s important is that through whatever venue we can find time for this introspection, we should be sure not to be overtly concerned with the reactions of onlookers, be it in the form of a grade, reader feedback or AIM buddies telling us that they dig our profiles. As Robin Williams’ character in “Dead Poets Society” instructs his students: “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we’re members of the human race.”

So dash thoughts into a tattered notebook like Jim Carroll or air your dirty laundry for half the Pitt community to skim through before Sociology of Sports starts. Just make sure that, like Crowe, you keep in mind just exactly who it is that you are writing for and why you are obligated as a human being to do it.

E-mail Daron Christopher djc14@pitt.edu.