Since this is my job, or anyway one key aspect of it, writing isn't just any old thing I might or might not do, like gardening or staying fit. It counts as an important, even essential, task within the highly artificial and contingent universe of meaning out of which I have constructed my identity. I am a writer of books, and therefore must continue to write books in order to maintain the coherence of that identity, vulnerable as it is through the passage of time. At a certain point, hard to define but inevitable, if I have written no further books, I slip, like an unreturned phone call, from the status of deliberate writer into the status of former writer. This shift is distinct from but oddly related to the familiar law, first noticed by Auden, which dictates that all writers under forty are "young" while all writers over forty are "failing to fulfill their promise."
Reminds me of something Anna said:
It occurs to me that, just like you shouldn’t confuse your schooling with your education, you shouldn’t confuse how you make your living with what you do.
