What I’ve realized recently is that my Wikipedia Cave is not really about Wikipedia.
It’s about certainty.
The outside world is full of judgments that arrive without explanation. A bookstore reads your novel and decides not to stock it. A reader stops seventy pages in and quietly walks away. Contest judges deliberate behind closed doors. Reviewers leave stars without context. Emails arrive that begin with phrases like “after careful consideration.”
And none of those things come with footnotes.
Wikipedia does.
On Wikipedia, every claim requires a source. Every statement can be challenged. Every sentence must survive scrutiny. The rules are visible. The standards are written down. If someone disagrees with you, they have to explain why.
That level of accountability is strangely soothing.
Perhaps that’s why I disappear into it when the noise gets too loud.
Because writing a novel and sending it into the world is an exercise in radical uncertainty. You spend years creating something. Then you release it and discover that other people will decide what it means, whether they finish it, whether they recommend it, whether they connect with it, whether they care.
There is no citation template for any of that.
No reliable source exists for the question that writers secretly ask more than any other:
Was it worth doing?
Wikipedia cannot answer that question.
Neither can Goodreads.
Neither can a bookstore buyer.
Neither can a contest judge.
But when the noise becomes overwhelming, there is comfort in pretending that every problem can be solved the way an encyclopedia solves problems: through verification, precision, and evidence.
Sometimes I think I’m editing articles about Nicolas Mathieu.
Really, I’m hiding from ambiguity. And from all the writers, myself included, spending our sentences on Substack Notes about AI and self-conscious, paranoid writing.
Lately, for reasons I can explain only partly, the tunnel has had Nicolas Mathieu’s name written over the entrance.
Part of it is simple literary hunger. I finished Connemara and wanted more. Then I wanted all the books. Then the lesser-known, shorter works tucked into periodicals. Then the ones that haven’t found their way into translation yet. Then the strange, beautiful tennis dispatches where Roland-Garros becomes a study of endurance, humiliation, class, aging, heat, and desire.
But part of it, I suspect, is that Mathieu writes about exactly the kind of life-noise I am trying to escape: ordinary disappointment, social humiliation, work, class, longing, failure, bodies under pressure, people who carry whole histories inside gestures no one else notices.
In other words, I am hiding from uncertainty inside the work of a writer who understands uncertainty almost too well.
That may be the joke.
I retreat into the encyclopedia to make neat little boxes around a writer whose fiction refuses neat boxes. I organize the bibliography. I verify the awards. I track down the publications. I make the article cleaner, clearer, better sourced.
Meanwhile, outside the cave, my own book is being subjected to the same unmanageable world his characters live in: accepted here, declined there, understood by one reader, abandoned by another.
No wonder I keep editing.
Everything makes sense in the cave, but it is not a home.
Not really.
You can’t relax there. Life doesn’t happen there. It is a silent place, and that is part of the attraction. No one bothers you there. No one asks anything of you. Nothing arrives demanding a response.
But like the Room of Requirement, or the Mirror of Erised, when you come back from it, you find the world is different again.
Or maybe it is not different.
Maybe you are.
The uncertainty is still there, but now it feels sharper because you have sealed yourself away from it temporarily. The cave did not remove the noise outside. It only postponed your return to it.
So reintegration becomes another ordeal.
A vicious cycle.
Or maybe a viscous one: slow, sticky, hard to move through.
It is vicious, yes, but it is also viscous. You come back from the cave covered in something slick and half-alive, like a Stranger Things creature or a newborn baby, dragged back into the world before you are ready to breathe in it.
Yuck.
Why do I do this to myself?
Maybe it’s necessary. Like the cycle that self-help author from the nineties described in the book that seemed to be in everyone’s house back then: retreat to the cave, watch football or tennis, sleep it off, wake up, and face another day of ordinary drudgery.
In my case: let the literary magazine live another day without being fixed. Let When the Wind Turned acquire a little verdigris in the margins. Forget the economy, the stock market, the bank account.
Go add another external link to Nicolas Mathieu’s Wikipedia page.
You know you want to.
I’m kidding.
Sort of.
Oh, by the way, it’s his birthday today. Of course I know that, since I’ve been living in the source code of his Wikipedia page. My birthday is less than a week away.
Birthdays.
One more year from the big one.
I don’t feel fifty. I don’t feel forty-nine, either.
This morning I found myself thinking about all the children’s books people like to write. Why? Why do we need another picture book? Aren’t there enough caterpillars to keep the millions of children who still read reasonably entertained?
I’m being unfair. Children need books. Of course they do.
But whenever people talk about the future, or art, or technology, or AI, the conversation bends almost automatically toward the children. What about the children? What will this do to the children?
It’s a good question.
It’s just not the only question.
Because honestly, of all the creatures in the world, the ones I worry about least are the children. Not because children are safe. Not because childhood is easy. But because, culturally speaking, we at least know we are supposed to care about them.
They have toy stores, video games, summer camps, school libraries, entire wings of public libraries built around tiny tables and bright rugs and little chairs.
Have you seen the children’s section lately?
Trust me: the kids are covered.
The ones who seem less covered to me are the big people.
The ones who still need stories but are embarrassed to admit it. The ones who need beauty but call it self-indulgence. The ones who are tired, lonely, overstimulated, underpaid, overextended, aging, worried about money, worried about relevance, worried about being replaced by software, worried about whether the thing they made matters to anyone at all.
The ones who retreat to caves because the world has become too loud.
Maybe that is who I am writing for.
I guess where I’m going with all this is simply to say that everyone needs attention and care.
But here’s the rub: you won’t find it in the world, at least not in any lasting way.
You’ll find moments of it. Brief flashes. A conversation that lingers. A review that makes you feel seen. A reader who writes to say that something you made mattered. A friend who remembers. A stranger who understands.
But nothing sustainable. Nothing permanent.
An actor gets attention by performing, and then the curtain comes down.
A writer gets attention by putting her work into the world, and then the world goes silent again.
If you’re lucky, you get reviews. Even bad ones are better than none at all. Unfortunately, “none at all” is the default setting. Most people are busy. They are raising children, paying bills, worrying about their health, worrying about their parents, worrying about the future. My book will never be as important to anyone else as it is to me.
Nor should it be.
People have their own lives to live.
Their own caves.
Their own noise.
And maybe that’s the point I keep circling without quite arriving at. The attention we need from the world is always temporary. The care we need from other people is always incomplete. The certainty we want never quite arrives.
So we learn to live in the interval.
The noise, the silence, the noise again.
Another birthday.
Another commute.
Another morning.
And somehow, despite everything, another attempt.