Writers Retreat
Writers retreat as if the battlements have been breached, the last line of defense flanked, their own artillery turned against them. They retreat to villas that arts philanthropists have bequeathed out of a nagging feeling that, had they not come into money, they might have been writers themselves, whereupon they too would have retreated. Writers retreat, firing a few last futile shots over their shoulders, missing high, to lonely houses that belonged to dead writers, who also retreated. They retreat to refurbished castles, to remote cabins, to lakes where the docks stick out into the water like the tongues of petulant cousins. Fleeing, these writers are working on a collection of poems worthy of being left in a desk drawer when they die, to be published and praised after they’ve retreated from the world, or a novel they’ve carried around in their heads for years, waiting for the people its characters are based on to pass away so they won’t be sued. Transfixed by their work, they retreat so much that they cease even having lunch with the others who’ve retreated with them so that their meals have to be delivered to them in picnic baskets left outside the door. By the time they finish the line or the sentence they’ve retreated for the morning to work on, whoever knocked to let them know their meal was there has vanished. It’s as if everyone around the writer has also gotten into the habit of retreating. While it is more common that writers retreat indoors, sometimes, in the afternoons, after eating the lunch that was delivered to them as if by a ghost, the thought crosses their minds that some fresh air might do them good. And so they might retreat outside and sit writing on their laptops in the sun until the late light grows so bright they can no longer see the text on their smudged screens, whereupon they rise and retreat back inside to dark, quiet rooms that underpaid maids cleaned for them, maids the writers who’ve retreated won’t leave a tip for, not because they’re stingy, but because they don’t know that the maids even exist, the maids having retreated before the retreating writers arrived. Though the rooms are clean, there hovers in the air a scent of lemon oil, a scent that itself is redolent of banishment, and that makes one of the retreating writers think, for some reason, that he would like to read a biography of Napoleon, who knew well the art of retreat, from Waterloo, to Elba. Now that you know where writers retreat to, you may be wondering what they’re retreating from. From their spouses, their children, their students, their agents, editors, publicists, their very readers. If they didn’t retreat from their readers their readers would have nothing of theirs to read. They retreat also from WiFi (though it’s available in the common area, a room they retreat to to check email and retreat from as soon as possible), CNN, Facebook, Twitter and so on. You name it and they’ll retreat from it. But why do writers retreat, as if they were being pursued by torch-carrying hoards who want to tar and feather them, then put them in the stockade? If you can catch a retreating writer they might joke and say that they retreat so they won’t retweet, then grow serious and say that they retreat in order to write. But, alone again in their rooms, having retreated from you, who somehow managed to catch them to ask the question, they might realize that to write cannot be the only reason why they retreat. After all, didn’t they used to retreat into their rooms or their treehouses or their forts in the woods when their parents started fighting, long before they thought of themselves as writers? It was in their rooms, in fact, that they realized that shouting heard through a wall is always interesting. There and then was where and when they first learned the value of retreating.