Roger Rosenblatt, in essay “I am writing Blindly,” believes that people “are a narrative

species,” who need to write messages to one another. To write something is an integral part of a

person’s life because “we exist by storytelling”. For example, Rosenblatt shows us that people

will write for as long as they live. “The impulse… like a biological fact” gives people the urge to

leave one another the moments of their lives on paper. If people write, then they live and

develop. The opposite example would be schizophrenics who “suffer from a loss of story,”

because their “pattern making faculties fail,” and their “brain breaks down.”

Writing, as one kind of communication, is a connection or bridge between an author and

a reader, alive and lifeless, past and future and “has been so important in America” Rosenblatt

thinks. Messages to other people or blind writing is “the deep proof of our need to spill, and keep

spilling, lies in reflex, often in desperate circumstances”. For example, a doomed Russian sailor

trapped on the crippled submarine Kursk scratched out a last letter to his wife revealing that he

and twenty-two comrades survived the blasts that sent them to the bottom of the sea. As Lt.

Dmitry Kolesnikov struggled to put down his final thoughts, freezing water seeped into the

compartment and he knew there was little chance of escape. "None of us can get to the surface,"

the twenty-seven-year-old officer wrote. "Two or three people might try to escape the submarine

through the emergency escape hatch located in the ninth compartment.

Additionally, a mine foreman, left his farewell note on the back of an insurance form. As

he huddled with eleven fellow miners trying to shelter from poisonous air in one of the farthest

reaches of the Sago Mine, Martin Toler Jr. took an insurance form and a