It’s a strange and painful business, this business of trying to write. You get stuck, you see. The words won’t come.

You’ve got this notion—a good one, maybe—and then you’ve got to put it on the page.

They say “less is more.” An architect, some fellow named Mies van der Rohe, gets all the credit. A tidy little phrase, perfect for a clean, empty room.

But then you find out it was a poet, Browning. He said it to a woman named Lucrezia, and he wasn’t happy about it. He was being judged. A bit of a sad shrug, that’s what it was—an empty slogan born of a poet’s misery. A fine fraud, really.

Then you get all the other ideas, the ones that are far from simple. The Gothic—dark and pointy, like a bad dream. The Baroque—just an ornate mess, a pearl that went wrong. And the Rococo—an overblown version of that mess. Everything gets convoluted, exaggerated.

Then there’s the other side. The Doric, plain and unsophisticated. The Tuscan, a restrained version of the plain. Thoreau, that walking fellow, liked those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts. And he thought the people inside were all in bed. A nice, quiet thought.

And then, of course, there’s Hawthorne. He says he’s glad his style is “plain.” He wants the words to “absolutely disappear into the thought.” A noble sentiment, I suppose. The words vanish, and all that’s left is… what? The thought? The silence?

I sit here thinking about all of it—the architects and the poets, the Goths, the pearls gone wrong. I want to write, you see. I have a thought, a vague, twitching thing in my head. But the words, they won’t come. They won’t disappear.

They just stand there like a crowd of people in front of a building—pointing, shouting, getting in the way. It’s a fine state of affairs. So I sit. And I stare. And I think about all these styles, all these grand ideas.

And all I’m left with is this damned block. A blank page. The ultimate in “less is more,” I suppose. Except it’s not. It’s just less. Less of everything. And that’s all there is to it.

It was last week, a peculiar sort of day, when I found myself talking about Amare Mammo. A man you associate with everything about a book in this land. A man who, it seems, held the very spine of our literature.

The conversation was meant to be brief. But then I got emotional, you see. Two hours. It all spilled out—a long, rambling lament. Less about him being the editor of editors, and more about how he plucked Debebe Seifu out of accounting and placed him where he belonged.

It’s a grand kind of theft, if you think about it. His immense essence is what Nebiyou Baye recounted to us.

Young Nebiyou, starting at the university, was given the very desk and chair Debebe once used. And Nebiyou’s father, Professor Baye Yimam, lamented the loss of the man while reminding his son what it takes to even sit there.

It’s a fine, quiet horror.

After all that talk, I walked. From Tomoca, past what used to be Mesfin Woldemariam’s house. And it all came back—the first time I saw him at the graduate school, a memory that only arrived after a string of failed attempts. Then, months before his tragic end, the most unlikely thing happened: he sent me a friendship request on Facebook. A fine, modern kind of handshake.

The reason for it? A piece I’d written. A small, pathetic little story about a failed date on the night Trump was elected. The shock of it all. The confusion. I must have looked drunk. I couldn’t tell the difference between blue and red on the TV screen. And this girl, she looked at me and sighed for my entire generation.

We were “only Geography,” she said. It had a nice ring to it—a sort of Pirandellian touch, I thought. So I called the piece Geography. One of my friends must have sent it to him. And that’s the whole thing, really. For those of you where more is less, this is all. But for me, this is not everything.

Then I remembered a time I was late for lunch in my final year of college. I had to cough up some of my mother’s pocket money—a precious, foolish thing—and go to the law lounge, where the dignified sorts ate.

I was standing in the queue when Mammo Wudneh walked in. I saw my chance. I seized it. I spared him from the queue, a humanitarian act if ever there was one, and sat with him. We ate, and I chattered on. I told him I had all his books at home. He listened.

When we parted, I felt a peculiar anger—a kind of simmering, pointless rage. I lamented the silence, the things he didn’t say. Why hadn’t he written about the security apparatus, the whole sordid business?

It was then, in that moment of anger, that I understood the great and terrible truth: less was more.

More than just an architectural slogan—it was a philosophy of survival. What went on then, the whole chaotic, brutal mess of it, was a thing best left unsaid. A kind of silence. A grand and necessary quiet. So much for my anecdotes. All that remained was the anger, the lunch, and the silence. And that’s all there is.

You know, it’s a strange and painful business, this business of trying to write. You sit down, you have the best of intentions, and then it all comes to nothing. That’s the sum of it, really.

I started off with a vow. A New Year’s resolution to myself and to a diary—a silent, empty thing waiting to be filled. I told it I would have it “firmly in my grip.” What a laugh.

It wasn’t a lack of things to say—that was the real horror. It was a deluge. A tidal wave. Too much. A cascade of color. A sickness of detail.

I vowed to capture not just what happened, but what almost happened, what lived only in my head. A foolish vow. I get into something, anything—a passing affair, a dream—and I am consumed. It’s not half-measures with me. It’s all or nothing. I tried to pull it all back, to recollect, to conjure it onto the page. The words failed.

A writer’s block, they call it, for someone who isn’t even a writer yet. A fine paradox. I go somewhere, I talk to people. Too many questions. Too many answers. Too much analysis.

The girls—they didn’t like it. “Unromantic bloated innuendo,” they’d say. I suppose I was trying to build a castle in my head, but I was too busy asking for the blueprints.

It’s the same with everything. A job application? A simple thing, you’d think. Not for me. I’m in it, soup to nuts. I’m filling out the forms, I’m interviewing myself, I’m already in the office, living in the location. The good, the bad, the ugly. It’s a kind of madness. And then there were the books. Reading a book, for me, was just another kind of writing it all over again. I remembered ፍቅር እስከ መቃብር (Love Unto the Crypt)—and a painful fact I had recently learned: it was first written in English and rejected by a New York publisher. I thought of the tears, the wet pages, and the disdainful way I used to stare at the author’s picture. It wasn’t a book; it was a family story. My story, almost. I wept. Not much blinking those nights, either.

I’m always in a conversation, wherever it is, and I’m always wondering why I couldn’t be a writer. I’ve always been hunting for characters, you see. As if they were lost luggage at a railway station. I was in Dire Dawa once, in the ’90s. I’d listen to the girls, the “comfort girls” from Assab. Girls from the disbanded army, you could tell from how they sat, their stories silent. Or the teens heading to Djibouti, waiting in a famous bar, playing at being “posh prostitutes.” I listened. I took it all in.

Then there was the group from the Defense Construction Industry, talking about their bitter memories. They spoke of a low-ranking officer in charge of a general store who was ordered to release items without a gate pass. In utter disheartenment, he threw his military cape to the ground—a tragic little gesture for which he was later disciplined. And then the colonel. The humble one, loved by all. He’d join any funeral he saw, rich or poor. He’d cry, he’d call his late wife’s name. A man who couldn’t get over his grief. He’d jump out of his car, ask if it was a woman survived by a husband, and join the procession. He would walk as long as he could. What a sorrow. What a thing to see. I couldn’t even catch his name. I wept in my bed that night, thinking of him. Thinking of the argument they must have had, about who should die first, so the other wouldn’t be left in anguish.

I thought about stretching these stories. Backward, forward. But it never happened. Then, a decade ago, I thought I’d get some insight. I talked to some young people. They said “Fifty Shades of Grey.” The book-readers and the movie-watchers, all of them. I hadn’t read it. The reviews told me I was unfit. But I thought, for the sake of my future book, I should. I read it in a day. And then I thought of my father.

My poor father, who saw two people kissing in a cinema hall, and never went to a movie again. I thought of him and I thought of “Fifty Shades,” and I just wondered how far we’d come. I looked at myself, a misfit, unsophisticated. The things you had to be to write that kind of book. I thought, why should I be that? To write a book about wild impropriety and animalistic unrighteousness? No. I will never write a book. And yet, I can’t stop thinking about that colonel. That amazing soul. I wonder where he is. I don’t doubt for a second he still joins those funeral processions. A man who, unlike me, found a way to act, to do something with all that pain. A simple, terrible thing. And me? I’m still just watching, wondering, failing. What a life.

You send something out into the world, a little piece of yourself, and what happens? One friend glances at it. He’s busy with another book. The rest say nothing. Silence. Which is worse? The silence, I think. It’s either they don’t like it, or they haven’t had the time. Either way, it’s nothing. A trifling attempt. It’s a punch to the gut, that’s what it is. A pain to relieve a pain, and it only brings on another. A peculiar kind of numptiness. You lament. You think, what was the point of all that? And then, a day later, you start writing again. What else is there to do?

And now, a new problem: nothing to write about. The well is dry. So you start listing other failures. Dancing. That came to mind. The last time I was on a dance floor was a long time ago. A lifetime, maybe. It’s the mothers who are the best teachers, you know. They just say the right word, show you the right thing, over and over, with love. No one else is like that.

I had a salsa teacher who was just so. We started, two couples, in a private class. And there was a girl who worked next door, and every time she caught a glimpse of us, she’d start rumbling with laughter and fall to the ground. It was an utter disaster. It reminded me of a friend, his first time in the water. After a few instructions, he was on his own. He was a brouhaha motile, a man whose motor control had simply gone out of whack. My friends just cackled, writhed, and fell into the water. He never came back to the pool. Our dancing was a standing version of that. Ungraceful, going to pieces, a mishmash of styles and non-styles. Kicks from Taekwondo, Wushu, a breakdown choreographic horror. Only I survived the Sturm und Drang of it all. I thought to myself, how close I was to the distant Spanish world.

My mind wandered back, years before. Five years old. To a place called Sombrero. Spanish paintings on the wall. A live band. My heart beating with the drums, the cymbals. My little heart  head-over-heels on the floor. And then, later, in the eighth grade. We were taken on a school trip to an exhibition. There was a scary tunnel with red “x” marked photographs of purged officials. The purged founding fathers of the Derg. And one of HIM’s Rolls Royces, a twenty-mouthed Stalin’s organ. When we came back, there was the Embajada de España. A strange-looking place with a far-off sound.

My teacher, she’d try to teach me the moves. She was so pliable, so graceful. And I was… gracelessly immalleable. I was too caught up in my head. Thinking. Reading. Don Quixote. Trying to make sense of the Spanish world, but there was no one to share it with. My teacher wasn’t even interested. I started to sort out the other dancers. The rest were talking about the same two or three boys. Who belonged to whom. A strange, beastly kind of trigonometry. A one-to-many function. And the ones on the sidelines, they just stood there. Looking down their nose at everyone.

There was a girl, with whom I had some chemistry. We moved well together. But she lost interest. Either because of my talk, or the pressure from her dancing partner—a girl, a strong, boyish type who led and followed with equal ease. And then it ended. Adios. My attempt to get rid of my social distancing, my latest try, was battered. Battered by the revolving definitions of relationships. ¡Caramba! I missed the ambience.

The girls gyrating, the eyebrow-raisers. The Bachata, with its bedroom looks. The Meringue, a jittering, giggling revolution. The Lambada, with its Brazilian flavor, the skirts swirling. I wished it had happened with that girl from my freshman year. I’d hold her hand, she’d struggle to close her eyes, I’d pull her close. Or, if not that, then to write a piece. A piece as fluid as Meringue, as close to the heart as Bachata, as hot as Salsa and Lambada. But the words aren’t there. And the dancing is over. So you sit. And you fail. And you keep on trying. What else is there to do?

I was in college, a freshman, and a fresh kind of misery. We were sent off to Metekel to build houses for settlers. It was one of the few times I was away from my mother. I was sick the whole way from Addis, a perfect prelude to the whole affair. My friends, bless their foolish hearts, had blown all their money en route. Mine, by some miracle, was still in my pocket. And a good thing, too. The food at the camp was what you’d expect: boiled, shredded maize, packed “zigin wot” with “galeta“—a kind of biscuit that could break your teeth but somehow softened in the gut. On rare occasions, we’d get some tinned horror from the Eastern Bloc, named after their dreary leaders. As for Injera with meat sauce, it was a ghost, a myth, and when it did appear, its distribution was as chaotic as its existence was rare.

So, with my savings intact, I was able to pay a visit to one of the small tukuls near our camp. The regulars there were a strange pair. There was Historian Aleme Eshete, with his PhD, and his friend, Aminu Hussain, also with a PhD in political science. Aleme, a diabetic, really shouldn’t have been there at all. His complaints were plentiful, and he did most of the talking. Aminu, like the rest of us, was mostly a listener. It came as no surprise when I later heard that his presence in the classroom was less to lecture and more to absorb the students.

A quiet man, full of silent observation. Aleme was a different animal entirely. He’d shock us with some document from a European institution, something that could, he claimed, change the course of history. For him, I suppose, more was less—the more documents he found, the less sense the accepted history made. It was a dizzying sort of scholarship.

I’ll never forget his comments on Teklu Tabor. Aleme admired him, praised him for answering most of his questions. Teklu, it seems, was a man who meticulously prepared. A quiet, orderly sort of man in a chaotic world. Then there was Feleke Gedleghiorgis, another PhD holder, who, according to Aleme, proved his worth to lead the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by simply having a certain something. Not like the others, who were removed from their positions based on what they said, or for just showing up to the interview. A fine observation. Some men are just there, and some are not. It’s all a lot of sound and fury, signifying very little. I’ve told you everything. Nothing to do now but wait.

Another memory. It was college, in the beginning, when everything was still a disaster waiting to happen. There he was, Abiy Daniel, untimely late. His brother, Michael, would follow. Young, too. Abiy was there, for what reason? Accompanying Wolf Leslau, an old man, a professor, maybe in his eighties, to the classroom. The old professor, a man who, you’d think, had enough of everything—books, years, knowledge. But it seemed more was not enough for him. A kind of hunger. And the brothers? Their brief presence made the whole scene less. Less of them. A fine and terrible balance. The old man, still seeking. The young men, gone. A glimpse of the whole damned thing, right there in the hallway. A lot of effort for very little. And that’s all there is.

He’s got it all wrong, this Hawthorne fellow. All this talk of dreams and realities. A dream, he says, is more powerful. I suppose so, if a dream is just a long, quiet way of doing nothing. A thousand realities? That’s a good laugh. We only get the one, and it’s usually a mess.

And then he says we “dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.” A perfectly useless observation. What else are we to do? We get up, we shuffle around, and the head is filled with all kinds of nonsense. That’s the dream. The sleep, that’s the walking. A long, dark march to nowhere. The whole thing is a contradiction.

Then comes the butterfly. Happiness, he calls it. You chase it, and it’s always just out of reach. Of course it is. And then, he says, you sit down quietly, and it “may alight upon you.” “May,” he says. The great hope of the human race. It may alight. It probably won’t. You’ll just be sitting there, quietly, with nothing to show for it but a sore bottom and the vague, bitter taste of failure.

This is all a terrible sort of poetry, a way of dressing up a bleak situation. This Hawthorne, he should have kept his mouth shut. Because now I can’t get it out of my head. The dreams, the waking, the pointless walking, and the butterfly that never lands. It’s all a fine recipe for a perpetual state of quiet misery.

And there it is. The vow. The great and terrible beginning. I had insisted, you see, that “less is more.” A tidy little idea, a slogan for the empty-headed. But a vow, now that’s a different animal entirely.

I vowed to buy every local literary endeavor. To read them all. A mountainous task, glorious undertaking. I would attend the book launches, stand in the back, and nod. I’d go to the theater, to the cinema, to watch the struggles of the writers, the poor souls who had to come up with one. One book. One play. One story. The great and terrible struggle to make something out of nothing. To fill the void. And I, in my wisdom, had decided to make their struggle mine. To sit in the dark, to read the pages, to watch them fail or succeed, it hardly matters.

So much for “less is more.” It was a lie, a beautiful, simple lie. Now there is only more. More books. More plays. More struggling. A whole lifetime of it, stretched out before me like a vast and terrible library. A fine state of affairs. And I have only myself to blame.

(Tadesse Tsegaye is a self-described nostalgia enthusiast with a keen awareness of the present as it shapes the future. Gifted at expressing his soul through writing, he combines his diverse experiences in resource management across multicultural and institutional settings to deliver insightful and captivating stories. Tadesse believes that sharing his tales not only enriches his own understanding but also offers a valuable service to others.)

Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye