`New Friends Like Old'

Armed with equal parts presumption and naïveté, I launched Anecdotal Evidence two years ago today. To celebrate that uncertain beginning, we took the kids to a much-touted pizza joint for dinner and were dismayed to hear the Super Bowl half-time show blaring from wall-mounted televisions. My first posts mingle, in memory, with the barbaric yawp of football fans and the diamond-tipped drill of Aaron Neville's voice.

That first post was not a post, at least as I have come to understand blogging, but rather a passage from William Hazlitt’s essay “The Fight,” under the heading “Commonplace Book.” Within days I dropped free-standing quotes and acquired a preference for weaving the words of others with my own into tapestries scaled to the dimensions of a cross-stitch hoop. My model was the essay. Blogging presumed I had something to say, and I learned how to say it by blogging. However, I stand by the lines from Hazlitt:

“…we agreed to adjourn to my lodgings to discuss measures with that cordiality which makes old friends like new, and new friends like old, on great occasions. We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.”

It's Hazlitt's "throb of pleasure," the reliable joy I find in language, that keeps Anecdotal Evidence up and running. Too many bloggers sustain themselves on high-octane anger. I'm fortunate to rely on alternative fuels, the celebrative impulse being uppermost. The energy and commitment are mine but there's a collaborative component to good blogging, and thanks go to Anonymous, Jack Ayer, Laura Demanski, Michael Gilleland, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Kurp, Ken Kurp, Michael Leinz, Dave Lull (copy editor, conscience), James Marcus, Brian Sholis, Ron Slate, Terry Teachout and Frank Wilson for their unflagging sustenance. The aforementioned Johnson wrote in The Rambler # 64, on Oct. 27, 1750:

“That man will not be long agreeable whom we see only in times of seriousness and severity; and, therefore, to maintain the softness and serenity of benevolence, it is necessary that friends partake each other's pleasures as well as cares, and be led to the same diversions by similitude of taste.”