Retirement

Philip Roth has given up writing! At 80, he reports a certain calm at knowing his long struggle with sentences is over.

Naturally, he's not the first writer to do so, to give it all up, to write his last sentence and say 'Enough of that for me'. Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co. is full of them – writers of what Vila-Matas calls 'the no'. From Herman Melville to Hart Crane, the book, a collection of footnotes on a nonexistent text, regales us with writers who, for one reason or another, succumb to the impossibility of writing. But Roth's announcement he is done has got to be the first such notice ever featured on the front page of the New York Times, never mind other such distinguished publications as the New Yorker, the Guardian, and the Paris Review.

Of course we know cataclysmic times because we live as if we had invented them ourselves. Born on the cusp of the end of the world, it seemed to us in the beginning that anything could happen, and after everything that has, it's fair to say it did.

And so it's hard not to consider my own long struggle with sentences. An early writer of the no and way ahead of Philip Roth, I'd already given up writing by the time I turned 16, when, on the morning of that special birthday and with the stale aftermath of my 'first kiss' still disturbing in my mouth, I stood on the unfamiliar shore of a local lake to which I had been brought the night before as a birthday surprise, dug my toes into warm and clayey sand, and, having finished reading Moby Dick just the day before, firmly renounced writing in my heart.