So whenever I need a joy fix, a little reminder of why it’s still worth it to sit down every damn day and tap away, I go back to the wellspring. For me, that generally means rooting around in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gardens. In this case, I thumbed through some of his letters from Valima, in Samoa, during the last few years of his life.

Mostly, during this time, he was sick. So he only wrote, I don’t know, eight or nine books in those four years, only hacked through a few hundred square miles of unexplored jungle, engaged in local politics only enough to become beloved of a gigantic swath of the population that called him “Storyteller” and built a road for him up a mountain in 24 hours on the day he died, so he could indeed lie where he longed to be.

Why Stevenson? Because more than any writer I’ve ever encountered, he committed his life to “communicating the incommunicable thrill of things.” His words. They just feel like I said them. Only more gracefully than I would have managed. And with less words (that’s for you, you Pete Atkinses, you word-misers, you).

Why else? ‘Cause he was one charming bugger. Because more than perhaps any other writer– ever– seriously– Stevenson communicated the thrill of trying to communicate the incommunicable thrill.

Witness:

This from one of his less sick days, when he was up trolling the (he believes) completely untrammeled jungle by himself. It’s just a nothing moment in a casual letter. But all the joy there is to be had in discovering a story, anticipating it, dreaming its possibilities, letting it take you over, are right here:

“ All at once… a strange thing happened. I saw a lianna stretch across the bed of the brook about breast-high, swung up my knife to sever it, and– behold, it was a wire! On either hand it plunged into thick bush; to-morrow I shall see where it goes and get a guess perhaps of what it means. To-day I know no more than– there it is.”

Or this deft, devastating, deceptively artless masterpiece of prose architecture, a short-hand characterization of one of his well-loved staff:

“ Paul– a German– cook and steward– a glutton of work– a splendid fellow; drawbacks, three: (1) no cook…”

It’s all in the not withholding, see? In the timing. In not saving the payoff for third in the list, because putting it first gets you both laughing at and somehow completely enamored of poor, splendid Paul before you even see his face.

Generosity of spirit. Charm. The thrill of telling and learning stories. Simple, really.

So, um… let’s all go do that. Okay?