Holinger: Feeling thoughtful? It must be fall

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Ever wonder how important you are in the Grand Scheme of Things?

If egotistical, you consider yourself vital to society, believing, “It’s all about me!”

If your self-esteem slips lower than the price of a new Dan Brown novel, though, you feel like a piece of shale in a diamond rockslide.

Most people hang out between these two extremes. Egotistical enough to believe, as Mr. Rogers reminded us, “You’re special,” after turning 5 or 6 years old, you suffer from the knowledge you’re not the only pea on the plate.

“Where’s all this coming from, Rick?” you ask. “What’s with the 1 a.m. dorm room bull session banter?”

The answer is outside, on your parkway, covering your lawn, perhaps still hovering above the patio.

“I’ve changed, and so have you,” the leaves whisper. “I’m falling, and, some day, so will you.”

So you crank up the leaf blower or grab an old-fashioned wood-handled rake, the gathering promoting remembrances of things past and ruminations of future endings.

Think my take on this whimsical? I have proof, of a sort.

At a recent meeting of the St. Charles Writers Group (sponsored by the city’s library), we had a full house, nearly all the seats occupied by Fox Valley’s Dan Browns, J.K. Rowlings and Billy Collinses. Since the group’s inception in 1995, the number of members showing up to critique their manuscripts wanes after Easter, then creeps back up, like recalcitrant truants returning, near Halloween.

I sometimes think writers look forward to blowing sleet, crusty slush and glazed sidewalks, conditions ripe for driving pens across yellow legal pads, clicking keyboards in solitary studies or critiquing convoluted plots around squared-off tables.

Nature’s shift into winter accelerates the imagination into confronting the long nights, the clock cutting short afternoons even shorter.

“While I have no advice for any artist, other than to find his or her own way,” writes California novelist and short story writer T.C. Boyle in Narrative,  “each of us must create art in order to address the central questions of human existence – for our own sanity.”

Which raises the question, “Who’s an artist?”

So grab your pencil, paint brush, guitar pick or ballet shoes and, as Irish poet Dylan Thomas directs, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Not that your creativity will influence the health debate or save the planet. “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” poet William Carlos Williams reminds us, “yet men die every day for lack of what is found there.”

In the Grand Scheme of Things, artists may be nothing, but as schemers of grand things, they rule.

• Rick Holinger is a contributor for The Chronicle and has been a resident of the Fox Valley for 30 years. Write to him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.

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