It’s astounding to realize that there are literally millions of people keeping journals on-line.  Countless web logs, “blogs”, bloggers, tweeters, twitterers, content creators of every stripe, filling the air with song and noise on tens of thousands of subjects.  A chorus of millions who can only potentially hear each other. 

Is this just the suddenly available mass expression of Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing?  The need to tell our story to another, to be heard as we reveal what moves us?   I looked for the quote just now on the internet, my battered copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God miles from where I’m typing now.  I recalled the scene of the two women talking in the night, filled with ‘that oldest human longing’, to make themselves known to each other.  Perhaps it mixes in my memory with proverbs I loved, since I read the book decades ago, but the quote I found “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Janie full of that oldest human longing -self-revelation,” seemed less elemental than the one I remember Hurston hitting me with when I was in my twenties.

Never mind.  I am sending these words out like the solitary space traveller forcing a rolled up slip of paper into an air-tight bottle and ejecting it through a one-way valve into the black infinity of space.

Wondering about this oldest human longing, as I recall the long story I heard last night of a new friend’s travails in an Asian military academy thirty years ago.  I sat at his kitchen table, with other things on my mind, like a guitar that needed to be fixed, though neither of us knew exactly how to get at the electronics inside the F-hole, and listened to a long story about things that happened decades ago.  I listened carefully, as I am only now learning to do, and reminded him a couple of times, when he got tangled up, where his diversions had taken off from.  The stories were interesting and put me in mind of others, which I did not tell, preferring to hear where these were going. 

I thought of Sammy, Sekhnet’s father, someone she often dismissed when I first met her.  I am interested in stories, particularly the stories old people tell of a disappeared world I can only imagine.  I have questions for them.  They like that, but not too many, of course, because they are trying to tell a story.  Sammy and I got along very well, largely because I was genuinely interested in what he had to say.  Another part of that oldest human longing, to have our words taken in respectfully by someone else.  But story, I notice over and over, is key.

I thought of two books I took out of the library recently.  One was by William Kennedy, the other by Stephen King.  Kennedy started with a flourish, his agile prose a song snapping like a flag in the breeze, now moving like a tango, now to sweaty barrelhouse piano twelve hundred miles north.  Soon he was dancing out his sheer love for language and dealing ten flavors of nuance, as a complicated story began to decant itself.  I read the first chapter, then took a look at King’s novel.  King did not flourish anything, there was no dance, he never sang more than a note or two.  He started right off, in an engaging voice, telling the story I soon found myself reading until it was told, 500 pages later.  I later finished Kennedy’s book and liked it too, but I was sucked directly into the story King was intent on telling me in 11/22/63.  The name of Kennedy’s book did not stick with me.