Weeds

Once in a golden hour, I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower, the people said, a weed.

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

My war against the weeds is going slightly worse than Afghanistan.

Ecologists defend weeds as nature’s way of nourishing the soil and protecting it from erosion. But weeds' spiky proflicacy spooks me―nearly as much as bugs do―and so I engage in an endless ground war against them.

A costly and unwinnable war.

I'm also fighting another unwinnable war: the war against critics. 

While I sow the web with words, hoping like Tennyson they'll flower, my critics see only weeds.

It's easy, of course, to trash an act of creation; much harder to attempt one. I take comfort in the thought. I take comfort, too, in the fact that critics have sometimes been splendidly wrong.

Chicago Tribune critic H.L. Mencken called The Great Gatsby―today considered a literary masterpiece and F. Scott Fitzgerald's definitive work―"no more than a glorified anecdote" when the book appeared in 1925. Mencken thought Gatsby was a "clown," and the other characters worthless and boring. Although Fitzgerald's writing is stylish, Mencken conceded, "this story is obviously unimportant."

Nearly 30 million copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold since 1925.

Critics also sneered at these novels when they first appeared: As I  Lay Dying, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, The Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, On the Road, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Catcher in the Rye.

“I've been all over the world," Leonard Bernstein said, "and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” Nor have I.

Now, back to the weeds.