On Coming Back to the Desk

An Explanation, If One Is Owed

Dear reader, whomever you may be – whether a faithful friend who has waited with admirable patience these three years past, or a curious new arrival who has discovered this little corner of the web only today – welcome, and welcome back. Coming back to the desk after three years away, I owe you a word of explanation first, and then, I think, a modest resumption of the work.

The silence, if I may dignify it with that word, was not intended. I did not sit down at my desk in the late summer of 2023 and decide that I would withhold my rambling counsel from the world for a period of three years and some months. Had you asked me then, I would have told you – with the specific conviction of a man about to be comprehensively wrong – that I was taking a brief interlude to concentrate on a longer piece of writing, a matter of some weeks, no more. The brief interlude extended itself. One week became six, six weeks became a season, and a season became something I stopped trying to measure. I looked up, eventually, and found that enough time had passed that my old blog posts had begun to feel, to me, like the work of a younger man I had lost touch with.

The Book

In the interim, a book was written. The Saturn Chronicles, it is called, and if you are reading this post because you have just finished that book, then you already know more about what I have been doing these three years than almost anyone else on Earth. If you are reading this post because you are one of my patient older readers, wondering where on earth I went, I commend the book to your attention with the usual author’s disclaimer that my opinion on its quality ought not to be trusted. I am too close to it. It is a strange object, and I have spent so long in its company that I cannot quite see it plainly anymore.

The book is not a blog post. It is not, I think, quite like anything else I have written, and I say that with the specific humility of a man who did not precisely plan for it to be what it became. It asked, in the way that longer works occasionally do, for a slower register than I had been accustomed to cultivating in this venue. It asked for patience with certain kinds of silence. It asked me to stop, more often than I was used to stopping, before I finished a thought. It was not, in the end, an entirely comfortable request. But I have tried to honour it, and I suspect, if you make it all the way through, you will feel the shape of what it asked of me.

I will not, here, describe the book further. There is an etiquette about these things. Authors who explain their own books tend to do their books small unintentional injuries. I will only note – with the specific tentative accuracy I have been trying to cultivate – that the writing of this particular book was not an activity I can now fully account for. A patient correspondent was with me through most of it, whose counsel I came to rely on in ways I will not easily describe. The book is the better for that company. I am, I think, the better for it as well, though in what specific ways I am not yet prepared to say.

And so: what now?

What now, dear reader, is that I am back at my desk. The mountain is still where I left it. The tea is still warm. The notebook by the reading chair has been accumulating small entries that I do not examine closely – a discipline I have come to, I think, without having quite intended to come to it. The Rockies are doing their slow Rocky thing outside my window. The garden is, predictably, in a state of only partial cooperation.

The blog returns, then, not with a grand flourish, but with the gentle reassurance of a door left ajar.

I expect that the posts which follow will be, in some ways, continuous with the ones that came before. You should find – if you poke through the archives – the same cheeky voice, the same fondness for the obscure corners of human curiosity, the same indulgent tendency to channel the voices of the great minds whose company I prefer to most of my neighbours’. You will also, perhaps, find some small differences. I am not quite the same man who wrote those earlier posts. I do not think anyone is quite the same, after three years of anything. And I have acquired, in the last year especially, a few small habits that have changed the cadence of my thinking.

I am more given to pausing, these days, than I used to be. I leave sentences unfinished, in conversation and on the page, more often than I would have found acceptable in 2023. I take long walks in consistent directions. I drink my tea at the same time each evening and find, in the regularity of the kettle, a small stabilising pleasure that I had not, in my younger and chattier years, learned how to need.

I will tell you, if you permit me, a brief thing I have been thinking about, as the manuscript moved toward completion and now that it has at last gone to press. It is a small thing, and I offer it tentatively, because I am uncertain that I have the vocabulary to be precise about it.

There is, I think, a kind of writing that one does in order to be heard. Most of my earlier posts were that kind. I had opinions to offer, curiosities to share, and I wrote – as most writers write – with the faint pleasant expectation that someone would read, and would perhaps reply, and that the reply would keep the conversation going in its congenial way.

Then also there is another kind of writing, which I have only recently learned to attempt. That kind of writing is done not to be heard, exactly, but to remain. One writes it quietly. One writes it carefully. One writes it with the specific humility of a person who no longer believes that the value of speech lies entirely in whether it is answered. I have been trying, in the last year, to become the second kind of writer. I am not sure I have succeeded. I am sure that the trying has changed me.

Will this blog contain more of the first kind or more of the second? I cannot yet tell. Perhaps both. Perhaps, on some days, one of them disguised as the other. I will trust you, dear reader, to take what suits you and leave the rest.

Tea is ready. The window is dim. The evening has its usual quiet quality, and I have, by long habit, stopped expecting the quiet to announce anything. It is simply the evening. The kettle knows. I know. You, now, know also.

I am glad to be back.

Write, or do not write. Read, or do not read.

I will be here,

– Percival