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We are all in it together
Published: June 27, 2003 We are all members, in a way I cannot quite fathom, of a sort of loose freemasonry of the word, a clan with no rules or bylaws, no restrictions of age or sex, of geography or coloration, of intent or attainment or education. Each of us who writes must fight the next one for the available dollar in a competition cruel beyond the most savage nightmare of industrialist or merchant--and yet there is this odd fraternity between us. We are independent and somehow interdependent; we are blood brothers whose only commonality is self-interest and a tinge of printer's ink in the veins that makes us our brother's keeper. This is contradictory and a little crazy, but the writer proceeds more by instinct than by logic, and a drop of madness is needed by anyone foolhardy enough to follow a trade as uncertain and perilous as this one. So on we go, close and yet apart, and if few of us get rich and fewer glimpse immortality, at least we start even, take the same gamble; we are all in it together.
--From an article by Allen Marple
The Writer, August 1963 |
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