On a dark and stormy night at the end of a jetty sticking into the raging surf of the Atlantic Ocean, a working class Jersey boy who did odd jobs and fished all the time to feed his family, hooked the biggest blue fish ever caught in New Jersey and, perhaps, the entire eastern seaboard.

The fish was as big as a motorcycle and the guy who landed it couldn’t lift it. He needed help. Somehow, he found help. When they got the thing back to his house on Brigantine Island, he had to remove most of the frozen fish that was already in his garage freezer. Then he wrapped his big blue in garbage bags and put it in the cold.

The guy and his family were still eating the thawed fish when he heard at the bait shack that a national angling association had offered a cash prize for a record-breaking catch. He contacted them. They ignored him. He contacted them again, sending another picture of the fish. No response.

Somebody tipped off the local newspaper. A reporter called and learned that there was no picture of the guy holding the fish up in front of a weighing scale because it was dark and raining when he landed, he didn’t know anybody with a camera (this was before the era of the cell phone) and the last thing they were going to do in fifty-mile-per-hour winds was put the fish in somebody’s truck and drive it over the Brigantine Bridge to the weighing scale at Gardner’s Basin.  Besides, he didn’t know there was a contest going on for big catches. He and his family would have eaten the fish by now if he hadn’t been told to wait until this national angling society certified his catch.

The reporter tried to get a response from the angling society but nothing came in before the deadline. The newspaper printed a cautious story that this fish just might be a record-breaker but we’ll have to wait for the powers-that-be to decide.

I was living at the Jersey shore and writing for magazines. I read the newspaper story and called the guy up. He told me I had just missed the “expert” from the angling society. The expert looked at the fish and said that it didn’t qualify because he hadn’t caught it.

Say what?

In order for a fish to count for the record, it has to be alive when it is landed.  The expert said this fish, while certainly large, had been dead on arrival.

I asked if the expert had done an autopsy. He hadn’t. He barely unwrapped it. He just looked at it and left.

I made a visit. The guy and his family lived in a tiny, humble, barely furnished two-bedroom house in Brigantine. We started talking and he invited me to eat with his family. He opened a few cans, threw a block of frozen ground beef into a frying pan, and served us sloppy joes (a sweet bolognese) on white bread.

Then he took me to the garage and showed me the fish. I’d seen tuna that big, but never a blue. He told me how he caught it, describing how he stood alone on the jetty in a bitter nor’easter, because storms can make the bigger fish come in closer to the shore. After hours of rain and wind blasting him in the face, he was about to go in when a voice spoke inside him and told him to stay a little longer.

He stayed a little longer and hooked the fish. Pulling it in was like dragging a truck. He would have lost it if the nor’easter wasn’t blowing toward him, sending the ocean, and whatever was in it, crashing up on the jetty.

I asked him if he’d read Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. He hadn’t.

When he saw how big the fish was, he didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t want to leave it there. Finally he put his rod down, ran to the nearest street and got help. The fish was there, breathing, when he returned.

I thanked him for dinner. The next day, I called the angling society. I got the line about the fish being dead. I asked if any tests were done to determine how and when the fish had died.

No tests were done. The expert knew what a dead fish looked like. Besides, the reward for a record-breaking catch was intended for professional sport fishermen who are scrupulous about documentation. How is it possible that an amateur could land a fish that big? This was one man’s story and, me being a journalist, I should know what they say about fish stories.

To be sure, some of what passes for journalism might as well be a colorful exaggeration. Journalism as a profession tends to be reviled by those who don’t like what they read or see. I had never wanted to go into the trade, but I had a fierce desire to prove to myself that I was worthy. Almost every short story I sent out had been rejected, sending me into despairing tail-spins ending in writers block. Journalism, with its deadlines, does not accommodate writers block.

Journalism does accommodate reporters who sympathize with their subject. Is there a great difference between a lone guy sending out short stories to magazines, and another braving a storm to catch a fish?

My article that suggested that the angling society could not believe that a simple, humble, hard-working Jersey boy could, through determination and luck, beat them at their own game.

After it was published the angling society sent down another expert who decided that the Jersey boy had, indeed, landed the largest blue fish, and that the check for the award was in the mail.

A month later I called the guy up to find out if he got the check. He said the check had come, and that after he cashed it, he the check, he sawed off sections of the fish and was trying to eat it, but everybody he knew was tired of the fish. He’d baked it, fried it, grilled it it so many times. Did I want any?

I thanked him but said I had a blue in my freezer at the moment that I caught at the supermarket. I told him that I liked to “blacken” it with black pepper and broil it, with onions, sliced Jersey tomatoes and garlic.

He said he’d try my recipe and we never spoke again.

My favorite season has arrived, bringing chilly mornings, spectacularly colorful trees standing heroically against a bright blue sky, blustery breezes that carry golden leaves to peculiar places, stink bugs clinging to the doors and windows waiting patiently to invade, and the comfort of sunlight warming my back.

A hot cup of tea tastes especially good in autumn. My dog moves faster on the walk–is it the cool air or scent of other dogs, suddenly more vivid now?

The squawk of birds and the song of the garden wind chimes are challenged by the rumble, rattle and whine of power tools. Our Home Owners Association hired an especially picky person to do exterior inspections this season.  The angry howls from my neighbors went up last month about the indignity, unfairness and capriciousness of the multi-page, copiously illustrated list of violations. This month, I hear the pressure washers, nail guns and skill saws rushing to meet the November 1 fix-it-or-else deadline.

One strangely wonderful thing occurred: people I never knew came up to me to complain about their inspection and tell me about that house down street whose inhabitants never did this or that, or wanted to raise chickens in their backyard. We found a common enemy. We few, we angry few, we band of owners–whoever had to spend money this month on useless exterior repairs was my brother.

Or sister.

To show the neighborhood what our newly increased HOA fees can do, a different inspector came around and marked sections of the sidewalk with a day-glo orange X. A week later these sections were blasted apart with a jackhammer and replaced with new concrete whose palid, corpse-hair gray didn’t match the older, sunbaked slabs. The neighborhood kids quickly customized these with their initials and, on one near my house, an obscene graffito.

As one among those whose jobs keep them at home, I savor the quiet moments when jets aren’t roaring overhead, the bad brakes on delivery trucks aren’t squealing, the one car with the bad muffler doesn’t grumble through the morning mist, the coy bleeting of a car responding to a remote lock or unlock signal, the amplified pop music from kids’ phones isn’t broadcasting–like the boom boxes of an earlier generation–the dubious taste of the listener.

The soundtrack of my life was once filled with music from several thousand recordings that changed from vinyl discs to “compact” discs and now, digital files, some of which my Ipod won’t play because I bought them back when Apple decided that you can store your music on only five hard drives. When you buy you’re sixth computer, you learn that the soundtrack of your life was never fully yours.

As much as I love that music, the more I find out about the composers, the musicians who performed it, the recording companies that made and ruined musicians’ reputations and did their best not to pay royalties and now, the digital gate keepers so certain that artists should make art for the luminous thrill of creation rather than anything as tawdry as money, not to mention the concert promoters who will sell you a stadium ticket that costs the equivalent of ten trips to the supermarket just to see your favorite band from a seat that gives you a better view of the city skyline than the tiny people on the stage–the more I want to listen to something else.

So, in these days before the cold air will force me to close the window, I listen to the wind chimes and the sounds of other people doing so many, many things until that first, marvelous night of snow, when we’ll wake up and see the naughty illustration on the sidewalk covered in a smooth flow of white that will soften the edges of the neighborhood and make our slumbering cars resemble enormous sheetcakes waiting for birthday candles.

My wife, the dog and I will put on our big boots (yes, we have boots for the dog) and go for a walk. The snow will crunch obediently under our feet. Our dog will do what dogs must and change the color of the snow in strategic places. Where every little thing had a noise to call its own, we will pause as the snow absorbs every sound but the sigh of our breath frosting in front of us.

Until the cars wake up, the snow blowers growl, the snowplows come to seal your car into a wall of packed ice just after you dug it out, and the October country, with its swish of store-bought Halloween costumes, squeaky cries of “trick or treat,” and parental admonishments, delivered while holding the latest cellphone, about the unholy torments awaiting those who take too much candy, will have come and gone.

I began a novel that I had started years previously with the hope that this time, the writing would be easier and I’d actually finish the thing.

I lasted about three paragraphs, went away from the word processor and realized I hadn’t written a blog post today.

So I went to the Write page and started a post that, after a few paragraphs, veered off into territory I’d already discussed in an earlier post.

Meanwhile I thought about a topic I really wanted to write about, though I knew very little about it: should philosophy be the aggregation of ways of thinking that benefit ordinary human beings as they negotiate their turbulent lives, or should it be a branching heresy of extraordinary thinking (which is not to be confused with thinking about the extraordinary) becomes a probe that reveals things about our world that most would tend to ignore?

Restated, should philosophy function as an art, or a science? The easy answer is it should be both–sharpen our understanding but also show us what we could be doing better–and neither, because our definitions and assumptions about art and science are based on prior experience and, for philosophy to grow, it must not let what has been thought previously hold it back.

Others among the zillions who write blog posts, and the few who actually read blogs other than their own, might say, “who cares?”

With that, I lasted about two paragraphs.

In my experience, what starts a writing session is mysterious. What stops it is obvious, but never final. Writing, like the practice of any art or activity that gives you something you can’t get anywhere else, is never finished. It stops and starts, again.

Writing doesn’t have to begin with an idea, but it helps. For me, Ideas come from an invisible place and, like seeds, they spoil if they aren’t planted. They also fail to grow and  propagate if the soil, sunlight, water, the presence of predators and other plants, isn’t within a limited range.

How much, then, does limitation–the frame around the picture, the rules that control the game, the moral or ethical traditions that identify acceptable behavior, the laws that construct society–have to do with creativity, whose proponents notoriously resist categorizing, qualifying, quantifying, disciplining and most every tendency to define what they’re doing?

Finally, to what extent is writing a blog post part of a larger avoidance strategy interferes with, prevents or limits the accomplishment of…going to the gym?

Thus I stop, to start again.

I spent hours writing. Then I pressed the right buttons and–it disappeared!

Where, I wonder, does our writing go when it is inexplicably swallowed by the technology that made it possible? I tried everything I knew (and few things I didn’t, while thrashing at my disappointment) and can’t find the piece anywhere.

Perhaps a specialist adept at computerized sorcery can enter the digital graveyard and resurrect my missing blog post, as well as the true stories, false starts, spiteful grumbles, passionate revelations and revisions of those revelations. Would one of those dusty scraps connect with the many, many readers who have so far not given this page their kind attention? Would my life be any different?

Or is this an Act of God that, one day in the future, I will acccept with gratitude. It will be another cool autumn day with a brightly blue sky and fluffy clouds parading grandly in a breeze that blows the leaves this way, and that. I’ll be walking the dog, or sitting down to savor the scene, and I’ll remember some prolix profundity I was hurl into the world of people who have nothing better to do than read blog posts. I’ll recall what I had said, or, perhaps, the spirit that made saying possible, and I’ll smile.

Or I’ll grumble when, having joined temporarily the tribe of those who have nothing better to do than read blog posts, I’ll find that this person said the very same thing, perhaps not as elegantly as myself, but close enough. Or that these other writers wouldn’t have written they did if they had encountered my post first.

Or I’ll just sit down and enjoy the day. Not every arrow we shoot into the air, lands I know not where, but enough of them do to make some of us put down our bow, hang  up the quiver and find something different to do.

Which makes room for those like me, who know that the best thing to do is pull out another arrow.

1. Good art saves the world. When you write what is necessary or worthwhile to you, even if no one sees it, the world becomes a slightly better place.

2. Avoid the third cup of coffee: when your creative energy runs out, wait for a while and it will return.

3. People will help you, but they will almost never be those you wish would help. The powerful gatekeepers, talent scouts, style mavens and star makers who were so significant in the rise of those you’ve heard about, are more concerned with their reputations than in finding and shaping new talent. Anyone they champion must be consistent with those they’ve championed previously. You shouldn’t want to be the “new __________” and couldn’t be if you tried. Those who will make a difference in your career, if not your life, are most likely unknown to you. You must trust that they will find you at the right time, and help your work find its audience.

4. Though eminently reasonable teachers and critics will tell you what’s wrong with your work, and offer numerous explanations of why the piece was rejected, or, if accepted, failed to do what the publisher hoped, these voices don’t know you, what you went through, what compelled you to finish what you started and why you believed sharing this was important. They always sound as if they know more than you, but they don’t and they never will.

5. You may be halfway through a work, only to see some aspect, element or detail of your stuff in the latest movie, TV series or book by your favorite author. This should not lead you to believe you are somehow unoriginal, or that what you were doing initially will have no future because it is too similar to something else. Your work is unique because you did it. Pat yourself on the back for having the cultural sensitivity and nuanced understanding to notice and include things in your art that many people care about, know about and find interesting. If you’re worried about being compared to others, vary your work work a little bit. What is called popular culture is not composed of startlingly original works that cause immediate paradigm shifts. It is the repetition and continuation of important narratives that build upon what was come before, but are changed, ever so slightly, so that they work feel paradoxically new and familiar.

6. You don’t need to stop what you are doing to do research because the essence of fiction is the realization of the unlikely, implausible or impossible. What makes a reader believe what you’re doing is the degree to which the characters reflect the reader’s personal concerns. “Honesty” in fiction is connecting with the problems, emotions, ups and downs that we all experience.

7. It’s easy to find the sense of wonder in spectacular places. What about uncovering in within the seemingly ordinary? Heroic qualities exist in everyone. Why not find them where no one else is looking?

8. An important human quality, and, in my opinion, the most vital subject for fiction, is in what brings us to the understanding that we are that we can make the world even more wonderful than it already is, despite the fact that loss, cruelty, injustice and every other blatant social evil seems to run free. Art is not merely a way to come to terms with life, but to see beyond narrow frames of mind, to what keeps us in the game.

9. Truth may hide in humor, and it is no less meaningful if it makes us laugh.

10. We must have food, shelter and clothing to exist. But we need art to show us how miraculous our existence is. And, because we’re always forgetting how extraordinary our lives are, we need new art to remind us.

11. What is called success is almost always someone else’s idea of achievement. It is possible that the pleasure you get from knowing you’ve written well has already found you. It is likely that it will find you again.

12. No work of art is perfect or finished. No work of art produces the same result for all that encounter it. It’s enough that you can make the stuff.

So make it.

When I began teaching several years ago, I modeled my behavior on the spectacular teachers I had known.

From those long years of my youth, when I wondered, like anyone stuck in a classroom, when I would be educated sufficiently and have my go at the “real” world–I remembered those instructors who, through skill, personality, bombast and revelatory brilliance, made me forget the hard desk, uncomfortable chair, bland colors, the ineptly erased chalkboard, the color-bleaching fluorescent lights, what other students were doing and what I might be eating for lunch in the next hour.

One teacher not only returned two, sometimes three typed, double-spaced pages of comments with my written assignments. He also line-edited my prose which, then as now, came out in bursts, with more attention paid to the expressive sparkle than the severity of compositional rectitude.

The typed, double spaced pages the flowed from my portable Smith Corona (eventually replaced by an black, wedge-shaped Olivetti electric) came back adorned with encircled worlds, question marks, and such terms as “misplaced modifier” or “inconsistent tenses” and, the most common of all, “awkward” with the occasional suggestion “revise.”

Such marks did not inspire me to become more careful about how my words tumbled out. They did not fill me with the urge for orderly precision that leads the typographically erring to master punctuation and spelling. If anything, such attention brought smarmy ridicule–“that fool spent more time marking up my work than I did writing it”–followed by despairing shame–“I made so many mistakes I’ll never become a writer because I don’t know how to write.”

This was before I spent some time apprenticed to a professional writer, where I learned of the existence of editors, who, as part of a job description that includes literary lunches at swank Manhattan bistros in which the editor spends more time talking to your agent than you, capriciously changing the title you agonized over for days, loping off entire pages of description and character development to make room for a magazine advertisement or to save money on paper, finding a hideous cover illustration that has absolutely nothing to do with what you wrote, coming up with a blurb or flap copy that does not in any way describe the book you wrote, and, finally, handing your work to a copy editor who will correct all those annoying composition mistakes.

Though some editors also write, most do not. The same creative divide that isolates restaurant chefs from the dining room servers, composers from performers, and film directors from everyone else, is necessary for art to find its audience and the audience to support the art.

That does not mean that people who are good at one thing can have the compassion to remember who they were when they weren’t so sure of themselves. When I humbly solicited my mentor’s opinion on my work, he shuddered at my spelling, yelled at me for not using the apostrophe correctly when writing the contraction of “it” and “is,  sputtered in rage about overuse of the passive voice and then threw my manuscript down on the floor, stomped on it, spat on it, crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the fireplace.

I did not show him any work again, and I was so traumatized that, for weeks, I stopped using contractions. At other times I was almost mute, because I had to think before speaking to make sure my tenses were consistent, I was using the active instead of the passive voice, my subjects and predicates were in agreement and my pronouns adequately modified their antecedents.

My apprenticeship ended with me returning to college and snarking at fellow students who used “kind of” and “sort of” instead of “nearly” and “almost.”  When someone said “this gets crazy” I replied “Get means to acquire or receive. How does this become mentally unstable?”

After a few months, I recognized that abusive grammar teachers perpetuate their abuse. An analogy is the sadistic, occasionally lethal hazing that goes on in college fraternities and military schools. Those who endure it and survive feel justified in tormenting the newbies because it’s all about tough love, right?

Wrong.

Correct usage, syntax, spelling and punctuation do not always bring clear and efficient writing,  though, I believe we can all agree that when everyone uses the same system to communicate, those “huh?” and “say what?” moments don’t occur quite so often.

Grammar is fundamentally about class. Our obsession with it can be dated to the 17th century as a movement among England’s rising middle class. Unlike the marginally literate aristocracy and royals, the wealthy spawn of merchants and industrialists wanted to distinguish themselves from the rabble from which they rose. An attempt was made (oops, passive voice!) to make formal English more similar to classical Latin. This was one more way to distinguish yourself and your background, prove that you belong, and demonstrate where you rank (or believe you should rank) in a social hierarchy.

If I must choose, I’d rather read an awkward, windy, dense or merely dull  sentence put together with good grammar, than a brilliant sentence incompetently written, because the grammar can act like a fog lamp. When the grammar is bad, you feel lost.

Bad grammar can have other consequences in the 21st century beyond the Twitter blurt. Though word processors contain grammar correction features, they don’t fix everything and letting a grammatical error slip into the workspace can rapidly become more than a faux pas. People who recognize the mistake will think you’re careless or sloppy, even if you’re not. They’ll tend to remember the mistake more than all the other good work you’ve done.

So “getting it right” isn’t about showing off in contemporary society, as it is about fitting in. Your prose must match the “style” of your publisher or employer. The New York Times has its own a way of using words and grammar. A Times editor once tortured me for an entire day over the placement of a comma.

What the Times thinks is right may be wrong for others. Some people believe bad grammar indicates you’re honest, unpretentious and direct. Clumsy, awkward prose may also be considered an act of rebellion in the tribal, slang-driven worlds of popular culture and social media, where bad is good and dope is better.

Of course, I didn’t “get” that until much later. What stayed with me, when I began to teach, was the enormous dedication of my professors who not only read and commented on my work, but identified composition errors, with the hope that I might recognize them and learn from them. I’m happy to say that I did, though it took a long time. Mastering grammar, like anything that requires patience, concentration and repetition, can become a metaphor for achievement.

When I learned the martial arts I had to repeat my punches and kicks thousands of times before I could begin to recognize what wasn’t working and how I could make them better. It’s the same with grammar. Accurate speech and writing is worth knowing, even if the path to that knowledge can be boring, frustrating and humiliating.

When I taught writing and journalism, the last thing I wanted was to intimidate students as my mentor had. Neither did I want to impose any of the “tough love” abuse. I wanted my students to understand that words were not merely tools that might get them what they want, but that they could be instruments of delight. You can be scary and funny with words. They can connect you to the sense of wonder.

While I inspired such connections to happen among my graduate and undergraduate students, I also line edited their prose, assuming that they would appreciate my efforts in the future, when, through practice, dedication and persistence, they would “get” English grammar sufficiently to reach that sunny state when you’re successful enough to have an editor fix the rest.

When I decided to return to high school to become the English teacher I wish I had, I took education courses to get a state teaching license. One of my teachers advised me to correct no more than one grammatical, spelling, usage or punctuation error per paragraph. Better yet–one per page. I should also use a pen or pencil with a different color than red, “because the color red brings out emotional connotations of right and wrong that we don’t want students to feel. The color blue can be even worse. Right now many English teachers are using purple. Purple is decorative, expressive and not so serious. Try purple.”

I did not point out that purple was the color of Roman emperors, whose thumbs infamously brought out emotional connotations at gladiator fights.

Instead I thought of the parents of students I might have. Some would know grammar well enough to see that, with five or fewer errors circled on a five-paragraph essay, I lacked the competence to identify the others.

Other parents in my school district had learned English as a second, third or fourth language. They would want their kids to be better at grammar than they were, so their kids would fit better into the American workplace and succeed.

So I reluctantly and compassionately taught English in a high school.  I came up with a way that, I hoped, students would learn from the more than five circled errors (in green, orange–anything but purple!) on their assignments. Rewrite, revise, show me that you improved the text, and your grade would go up.

This increased the amount of grading I had to do. I’m happy to say that some grades went up. I suspect, also, that some parents either wrote their kids’ papers or hired tutors to do so, because when I found mistake in those papers, the parents were quick to e-mail me and ask why I didn’t find the work as brilliant and ingenious as they did.

I also began to understand why my wife, who teaches high school science, gets punishing neck cramps from grading student work. I lasted three years at the high school.

I also created a writers group and I line edited there. The group has a few grammar cops, some of whom read Stephen King’s On Writing and share his contempt for adverbs. I happen to like adverbs. When someone in the group told a writer she had to eliminate her adverbs, I said, “really?”

The last time I was at the group I began line editing a submission and my hand became tired from holding the pen. Yes, there were numerous errors but, in identifying and correcting them, I asked myself if my efforts were genuinely helping the writer, whose intention was just to share a work in progress. When you’re doing a first draft, the most important thing is to write as much as you can, any way you can. Only when the first draft is finished should you examine critically what’s on the page, not to beat yourself up for not writing a perfect sentence, but to shape what you’ve done into something beautiful.

Most beautiful things have flaws, errors, rough spots, places where the touch-up paint didn’t quite stick but the full effect remains marvelous.

If any of those spots is becomes a bit too obvious, the universe permits the existence of editors, who just might make it all right.

putting a real awful cover or illustration on your priceless piece of art, (I guess I don’t know how to write”) , punctuation premiers and, the most annoying of all, grammar cops.

The lawn is an old brown carpet. Despite daily watering, many of the garden plants have withered, shed leaves and drooped so far down that they touch soil so parched that it might as well be hardened rock.

And then, after several weeks of rain falling everywhere but here, just a few hours ago, dark, wet spots appeared on the roofs of cars, on the baked gray asphalt in the street and, most obviously on the sidewalk in front of the house. As in nature, and our minds, dots began to connect to themselves and what was dry became gloriously, marvelously, miraculously wet. The roof thrummed with a gentle patter that became a hammering onslaught that then calmed down, as if, having surprised us with a sudden, unexpected play, the great gamer in the sky has pulled back to contemplate the next move.

I have started and ended some of my novels with storms. Having lived at the New Jersey shore, I’ve seen how a storm can change everything, for better, but, usually, for the worse.

It’s not for nothing that I’ve seen Shakespeare’s King Lear many times.

The famous scene occurs in the middle of the play, in which the Lear, betrayed by his two daughters, stripped of his army and all other possessions, rages pathetically at a storm pouring down upon him. At his side is his only friend, the Fool–his court jester who, in addition to telling truth to power in complicated puns and wit, shows a genuine, unconditional love for the addled King. They are soon joined by the loyal and faithful Duke of Kent, whom Lear had previously banished. Together they take shelter in an abandoned hut.

Though Shakespeare wrote during the English Renaissance, when the provincial British island became a major European power, this scene echoes the medieval attitude that storms and catastrophes mask the action of “providence,” the divine power that works in nature to rights wrongs, punish evil and restore a sense of moral balance to our turbulent world. The play suggest that we can either let troubling, disruptive events bring out the best in us (as they do with the Duke of Kent, the Fool, Cordelia and Edgar)  or the worst (Lear, before he learns his lesson, as well as Edmund, Regan, Goneril and their spouses).

Right now loving kindness seems in short supply. The nation is terribly divided politically, morally, economically and ethically. As Lear yells at the height of the storm’s fury, we consider ourselves “more sinned against than sinning,” that is, so obsessed with how others have victimized us that we ignore, for forget, what we did to bring us to our fate.

We rage in private and in the treacherously open wilderness of social media. We see the rich, the powerful and the merely famous behave badly in public and everyone wonders how, or if, the rain will come.

Until it does, we have better things to do than be an audience for the churlish raging of others.

We have better things to do than encourage, condone, defend and propagate such infantile tantrums.

We have better things to do than suffer in a storm. We should, as the Duke of Kent advises, take shelter because “man’s nature cannot carry the affliction or the fear.”

Lear eventually understands that there is more to be valued in loyalty and loving kindness than in all the land and armies he had once possessed. But epiphanies, however welcome, don’t always save us, and those we love, from the consequences of our mistakes.

No matter how long the drought may last, the rain will come. We owe it to ourselves to be the best we can, to nurture what is honest, loyal, loving and kind–before we, like the proud, vain, irascible king, lose everything.