While stepping up and down, and huffing and puffing, on a stair master at the gym, and reading this week’s New York Review of Books, a stanza from a poem I read in 1982 surfaced. Through my faulty memory I recall the stanza as:

–‘Tis hard to venture where our betters fail,
— Or lend fresh interest to a twice told tale;
— Any yet, perchance, ’tis wiser to prefer,
— A hackneyed plot then choose a new and err.

These lines reverberated as I found myself thinking, as I was reading the NY Review, “That’s what I meant. Oh, how he or she has written what I would have written had I the faculties and skill to organize and express my thoughts with such precision and grace.”

And, then, exhilaration at reading what seemed to be an excavation and presentation of latent thoughts, hidden and ineffable within my inner musings, began to sap my enthusiasm for venturing to express what predecessors and contemporaries have expressed before. The anxiety of influence? The urge for novelty? Could it be that what I have written is both good and original but, to paraphrase Johnson, the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good?

But, wait. Descent and subsistence come too soon. Our dignity, our individuality and inescapable autonomy, our will to assert, to act, to be a part, emerges, re-surges, and then reverses descent into lethargy, replaces lassitude, and propels ascent toward engagement, challenge and renewal.

Let others shrink before, and defer to, the received wisdom. I’ll take engagement any time.