That's so weird. I found a website called "The Electric Typewriter" that featured many essays by great writers. I was reading as many essays as I could to learn form; I wanted to write essays myself. I spent time reading Joan Didion, David Sedaris, and Hunter Thompson, but DFW caught my eye because I knew he wrote "Infinite Jest". I hear it's quite a read. Those footnotes, right?

While reading his work, I found myself comparing anything I might do in the future to the work he already accomplished. I thought "there is no way I will ever perform analysis on this level." It's one thing to come up with a main topic to write on. It's another to collect pieces of evidence to back up your claim. But there's an entirely different, creative process involved in flipping that evidence into an analysis of your own, and then giving the reader a gut punch of a conclusion tying your analysis back to your thesis. DFW did it so well. I don't know if I ever will be able to.

After questioning my ability to learn to write well, I found another essay by an author who questioned her ability to write after DFW. She said "I'll never write like [him]" to her boyfriend, in hysterics, and, to paraphrase, he said something like "Damnit, get ahold of yourself! He committed suicide!" And I think that's a pretty reasonable thing to keep in mind: he must have been one of those guys who was so smart that it caused him some dysfunction. I have problems enough; to reach for more intellectual ability is to reach for a more painful existence. I should be happy with the ability I have.

Check this out, there's an interesting poem called "An Epistle of Man" by Alexander Pope. He was a Deist, and believed mankind had its place in the Universe. He said it was folly for man to wish for the physical power of the "brutes" while wishing for the intellectual capabilities of the angels, thinking that it would drive mankind mad to be able to soak in so much information about minute details of reality. Maybe mankind doesn't have a Universal place, but maybe it's true that we individually fit into the machinery of the Universe differently, and to expect to have the powers of multiple pieces of machinery at once would drive us mad.

I am just a cog with my small ability to communicate. Development will only come through learning my place in the apparatus of the world.

I hope you are doing well experiencing a new city though! That sounds exciting. I want to leave the rural life but I am too comfortable in my ways now. Good luck!