BY MATTHEW HERBERT

I’ve always wondered how writer’s block happens. For me, writing is like sculpting. There’s already something in front of me when I start–a feeling, a problem, a book I want to discuss. All I have to do is start working on the thing that’s there waiting for me. Maybe sculpting is actually too artsy a simile. Maybe it’s more like mowing the lawn.

Don’t get me wrong. That’s not to say I’m much good at writing. It’s just that getting started and keeping a flow of words going is not a huge challenge. Indeed the judiciousness it takes to refrain from writing might actually be harder for me than the showy impulse to write. (Christopher Hitchens’s old line comes to mind: Everyone has a book inside them. For most people that’s where it should stay.)

So it came as a surprise when this blog, which for six years had glided along easily and bloviated endlessly, creaked to an unceremonious halt a couple months ago. It happened, funnily enough, just as I was starting a series of posts on why I find writing so addictive. What I wanted to say is that I write for the same four reasons that my hero George Orwell does, and those reasons keep showing up in my life in one way and another. Orwell lays them out with characteristic clarity and modesty in his 1949 essay, “Why I Write.”

But I never got to the second reason.

As a mere rhetorical device, I’ll pretend for a moment that my blog actually has a readership. What you might say, if you’re part of that readership, is that, of course I got tired of writing. It’s always Orwell-this and 1984-that. Maybe I should move on to something new?

You probably have a point. There is more to life than Orwell. I could try to see it the way Joan Didion sees it. She’s another hero of mine. Or I could tackle a biggish project I’ve always wanted to do on why Kurt Vonnegut is the definitive liberal of the 20th century. Or how lucky we Americans are to be readers at the exact time that the greatest historian of our, well, whole history, is alive and writing–Jill Lepore.

See?–the lawn is there, just asking to be mowed.

This isn’t writer’s block. The problem is not that I can’t put pen to paper. It’s more insidious than that.

The problem is that I feel no generosity toward half of my imaginary audience. I have no desire to commune with those who are cheering on the murder of liberalism. Further, I’m not sure of what I can do even for my sympathizers. Make them feel obligated to leave behind a like or an amen? Further tax their already etiolated ability to pay attention?

If I were to, say, make a cutting argument that the Supreme Court of our land and the various governments of the states are conniving to return us to the Fugitive Slave Laws days, in which southern reactionaries can demand that we northern liberals arrest and return their chattel to them, what would follow? If I were to further comment that Texas, by empowering private citizens to bring ideologically motivated suits against whomever they wish, is deliberately choosing to be like Romania under its communist dictator Ceaușescu–where people spied and ratted on one another all the time–again, what would follow? My liberal friends would cheer; my authoritarian connections (long unfriended) would smolder in scorn, or–much more likely–just ignore me.

So the problem is Orwell again. He said of his lifetime that it was a thoroughly political era, and all writing was therefore political. And then, faced with the worst political threat of all–religiously fueled, nationalist authoritarianism–he stopped writing and went to war, in Spain. Hitchens observes of Orwell’s choice that there was no point in writing an essay detailing fascism: all you had to do was look at the sadists and bullies arrayed on the other side of the republic to know what you needed to know about their “ideas.”

Dear (imaginary) reader, this is not an announcement that I will follow Orwell in trading in my pen for a rifle. There is no need to report me to the police. I am too wedded to soppy liberal morals about the wrongness of shooting other people. Even deeper, I have some vague but insoluble attachment to Abraham Lincoln’s insistence that we Americans are not enemies but friends, that we cannot be enemies. I would feel like a lesser person if I stopped believing that. I love Abe so much. But the will to keep believing him takes all my effort. It makes it awfully goddamned hard to write anything.