urge to communicate

I think that I have some basic urge to communicate levels of feeling – things from the nervous system, and from memory, to other people. It’s a basic urge, it seems to have always been there – that somebody wishes to record or set down feelings or things of what they were like on a given day. In the same way as when people went hunting many thousands of years ago, someone stayed behind to paint the hunters on the walls of the cave. It’s a mysterious thing because it really has no material value.

COLM TÓIBÍN