As a struggling young writer, Frank Cassese asked David Foster Wallace to read his novel. DFW kindly declined by postcard, and encouraged him to keep at it, writing "Lots of us don’t publish, though—it doesn’t mean we’re wasting our time." Cassese treasures the sentiment today:
I think Wallace truly believed that we are not wasting our time, even if our words are never seen by the world at large. The world has never been the best judge. It has never equitably distributed recognition to all those deserving. It sometimes gets it right, as I think it did with Wallace, but more often than not it fails us. So what he was telling me was not that publishing is not a good thing, but that it isn’t everything. It does not bestow value or worth on one’s work or on one’s self.
It does not make a published book better or worse than an unpublished one. And while the failure to achieve it may be no cause for despair, its attainment is certainly no cure. He was telling me what I already knew but had forgotten during my struggle for acceptance and societal validation, that creation is its own reward, that the project of writing is its own gift, provides its own consolation. Half a century before in The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus claimed that despite the absurdly futile and hopeless task with which the condemned king was punished by the gods, "the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
The Dish 