I've been reading an essay by Dwight Allen that ponders novelist Philip Roth's decision to quit writing novels. Various people have reacted with shock and skepticism to that announcement, and perhaps their disbelief has some foundation. Just as it's hard to imagine a retired butcher who neglects to display his knowledge of knives, or a retired businesswoman who refuses to opine about loans and collateral, it's hard to imagine a novelist, especially one as prolific and ambitious as Roth, who flat-out refuses to spin a tale. Dickens died at his writing desk, his head pillowed on The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and this ending seems apt and even noble. If Roth declares he has no such intention, does he dishonor the art to which he has devoted his life? Of course not. And yet.

I think now of a friend, one of the best poets I know, who tells me that he no longer writes poems. Poetry is over for him, he declares. He has nothing more to say in verse. I think of various musicians I've known--men and women who have played in professional orchestras or jazz bands or chamber groups, who, one morning, decide that they will never again pick up their cello or their trumpet. Just like that. I quit. No more. Enough.

And I begin to understand the relief that might accompany that decision. There is enormous strain in the perennial push to articulate. As Allen notes in his essay, art, like baseball, is a performance. Writers work in solitude, but the audience is there, poised for the agony of defeat, the thrill of victory. The fact that, for most of us, the audience is largely imaginary does not mitigate the drama, or the exhaustion, of the performance. But for a writer with a readership as large as Roth's has been, the performance may finally become unbearable.