If you've read this blog long enough, you'll know that I frequently return to a few key themes - one of which being that there's nothing original left to say or write about anymore.

It's something I try not to think about, something I try really hard to avoid acknowledging, but it just keeps returning ever so often to mock me and taunt me.

And it keeps asking - why, really, do we still write?

Are we trying to explain and describe Love? Lust? Sex? Greed? Betrayal? Despair? War? Marriage? Childhood repression? Struggles against despots? Surviving ethnic cleansing? Living in an alien land? Success despite the odds? Crime? Zombies? Elves and dwarves? Distant planets? Angst-ridden teenagers? The meaning of our existence? The lack of meaning in our existence? How our universe may just be a drop in a gigantic ocean of multi-verses? How there is no god? Or how there is a god and it created the universe as an experiment?

Done, done, and done again.

And done well.

And in different languages.

There is nothing you can pick up to read that somebody else cannot point to have been written before. And yet.....we keep writing. And we keep reading. And the trees, oh the tree, they keep getting murdered.

(A caveat here - I guess I'm really talking about fiction here. New books that are observational and informational non-fiction, those I can understand.)

So what is it? Why do we keep doing this? Why do those of us who do write, write? Why do we work so hard on these stories that we just have to tell? Is it anything more than just clever little nuances of word-arrangements and style-quirks and clever little lines?

And why do those of us who read, read? Why do we hunt down and devour all the "bright new voices" that spurt out onto the scene? Do we really think we're going to find something new that we haven't found before? Do we really believe that there's some new thought out there that nobody's thought of, and which will change the way we see our world? Or has it simply become about how well the person writes, rather than what they write about?

So, at what point does it stop being about the matter and becomes more about the style? If it's just about the latter, then that's fine. Reading Murakami and Keret and Vonnegut for the way they spin their stories is fine. But reading them and believing that they, and others like them, are saying something new and profound and, goodness forbid, wise - well, really now.

Yet, we write and we read. I write and I read.

And perhaps, the answer is because we want...need...the stories.

Because we want to keep understanding all the possible facets of any defined feeling/situation/era. Because we believe there is no absolute answer, and every story we read brings us closer to our version of the truth. Because we need to know we're not alone, and somebody somewhere looks at the world in the way we do. Or doesn't. Because this is the only way we know to live all those lives we haven't, or can't. And because, in the end, we still dream of being four years old and lying curled up somewhere while somebody's describing these wondrous lands and the amazing beings that inhabit them.

So, I write. You read. And when you're done, you can buy me a crate of mangoes.