A late hour, a quiet screen, and that familiar restlessness in the fingers – this is usually where I begin. Writing scratches an itch for me, and when life has been troublesome (in the past and again more recently), it offers a kind of healing I can’t quite get anywhere else.
The borrowed voice
I’ve always kept one eye on history and the other on science – the long arc of human folly, and the small, precise miracles that explain it. Yet I rarely write as myself; it feels simpler, safer, almost more honest, to let the “I” belong to someone else.
The creed on the doorstep
There’s a line that sits at the threshold of my work – “Feign the virtue thou dost seek, till it becometh thine own” – and it tells the truth in an old-fashioned way: we practise our way into becoming. On difficult days, I don’t always feel brave or steady, but I can write a person who is – and sometimes that borrowed steadiness follows me back into the room.
Forgotten and imagined witnesses
So I tell stories and share accounts of voices that were overlooked, mislaid, or never existed at all – because pretending is often easier than facing and sharing my own reality. If that sounds like cowardice, it’s also craft: a mask that lets the truth breathe without turning the spotlight into an interrogation lamp.
Catherine Bennett – New Corinth
And then there’s Catherine Bennett of New Corinth – my created companion in the margins, poised enough to say what I cannot, curious enough to chase what I’d otherwise leave untouched. Through her (and others like her), I get to be both witness and listener – making sense of trouble by giving it a voice that can stand to be heard.
If there’s a biography here, it’s this: I’m Bob Lynn – more comfortable in the chorus than at centre stage, and still learning, sentence by sentence, how to turn surviving into meaning.
And if any of these voices – forgotten, imagined, or merely waiting in the wings – have kept you company, subscribe to Vox Meditantis to have future posts delivered straight to your inbox.
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