So says Alan Jacobs, in an essay that ought to be disturbing to professional writers. Excerpt:

And yet many have been my idle words over the years. I wonder how much harm they have done to others, and even to me. I did not publish my first book until I was nearly 40, and while I used to regret that late start, I now am thankful that I didn’t get the chance earlier in life to pour forth yet more sentences to spend my latter years regretting. A handful of times over the years I have drafted essays only to realize, before submitting them, that I did not want to say what I had written there; and a few other times I have had cause to thank editors for rejecting pieces that, had they been published, would have brought me embarrassment later.

In some cases the embarrassment would have been because of arguments badly made or paragraphs awkwardly formed; but in others because of a simple lack of charity or grace. An essay begins with an idea, but an idea begins with a certain orientation of the mind and will — with a mood, if you please. We have only the ideas that our mood of the moment prepares us to have, and while our moods may be connected to the truth of things, they are normally connected only tosome truths, some highly partial facet of reality. Out of that mood we think; out of those thoughts we write. And it may be that only in speaking those thoughts do we discern the mood from which they arose. “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” — a terrifying judgment, when you think of it.

I read Alan’s piece the other day, and it sent me back to Cantos IV and V of Dante’s Inferno. In Canto IV, the poet visit Limbo, where all the righteous pagans who died before the advent of Jesus Christ spend eternity. It is not a place of suffering, but actually a very pleasant abode, where they do nothing but philosophize in the garden. Heaven smiles on them, but they cannot enter it. Their punishment consists solely of knowing that they will never be able to enjoy the company of God. Yet this is a pretty great existence all the same. Dante spends time there with Homer, Horace, and other poets, who welcome him as an equal. Writes Dante, “In my heard I exult at what I saw.”

In the next Canto — the fifth — Virgil leads Dante into the circle of hell where the lustful are punished. There Dante speaks with Francesca, an adulteress. She makes excuses for why she and her lover, Paolo, find themselves in Hell, blaming Love — that is to say, their passions — which she says was irresistible. But then Francesca tells Dante this:

“But if you feel such longing
to know the first root of our love,
I shall tell as one who weeps in telling.

“One day, to pass the time in pleasure,
we read of Lancelot, how love enthralled him.
We were alone, without the least misgiving.

“More than once that reading made our eyes meet
and drained the color from our faces.
Still, it was a single instant overcame us:

“When we read how the longed-for smile
was kissed by so renowned a lover, this man,
who never shall be parted from me,

“All trembling, kissed me on my mouth.
A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it.
That day we read it no further.

(“Galeotto” refers to Galehault, the go-between who brought Lancelot and Guinevere together. Crudely speaking, a “galeotto” is a pimp.)

Now, it is true that Francesca blames everybody else but herself for her predicament. She even, at the end, blames a book and its writer. Dante can’t be read as endorsing her excuses. But immediately after hearing this, Dante faints “for pity.”

It is interesting to contemplate the possibility that the pity he feels for Francesca and Paolo derives at least in part from the revelation of the power of the written word to lead people to damnation. Remember, he has just emerged from Limbo, a special place of comfort that God has reserved for noble poets and philosophers. Dante is feeling pretty great about being counted by history’s greatest poets as one of their own — and then he faces a couple who were damned by the sin they committed after being seduced by a book.

To be clear, the author of the Inferno doesn’t believe Divine Justice wronged these two. But my sense is that their fate shocks Dante (the character in the poem) into awareness of the moral responsibility a writer has for his words.

These cantos, and later Alan’s essay, make me think with regret — I should say, repentance — of much of my writing earlier in my career. When I was in college, I was deeply impressed by SPY magazine, and its way of savaging the rich and the famous with extremely clever, lacerating prose. I admired the brilliant style with which they took down their targets, and sought to imitate it in my own writing.

I wrote some pretty funny stuff for the first half of my career, and I’m not going to say I was inaccurate in all my judgments. But I was thoughtlessly cruel. I loved reading that kind of scintillating spite, and tried to reproduce it in my reviews. In my defense, so much oily hype and bullsh*t attends pop culture personalities,  events, and artifacts that you feel compelled at times to throw a generous splash of vinegar on the whole mess. This is merited at times, but it should be used sparingly, or at least more sparingly than I used it.

Over the years, I’ve heard from people I hurt with my words — I am thinking of one woman in particular, whose husband’s work I had made fun of, but there have been others — and I’ve regretted what I wrote. Again, it’s not necessarily that I made an incorrect judgment in assessing a politician, a movie, etc., but that I did so inhumanely. I find now that the kind of criticism that I used to admire now strikes me as having the overriding quality of malice.

To speak in Dantean terms, if I am granted to pass to Paradise through Purgatory, my misuse of the gift of language and writing will be the thing about me that most merits the purifying fire.