“[W]e 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.”
By now,
writing a daily post is second nature, another item on the list of mundane,
involuntary functions, like breathing and digestion. I’ve kept to that routine
except for a hiatus last spring after spinal surgery and a two-week stay in the
hospital. Even there I eked out a couple of posts. It would be a sorry day without
at least one idea occurring to me that was worth developing.
I came to
blogging rather late, largely because I was intimidated by the technological
knowhow I mistakenly believed was required. Now I know your average moron can
manage a blog, and many do. Recently a blogging veteran and friend, tongue conspicuously
in cheek, reminded me of the Golden Age of Blogs, early in the century. The
internet is a virtual graveyard of aborted blogs, most of them mercifully dead.
The obvious prerequisites for maintaining a blog would seem to be thick skin and
at least a minimal gift for the written word. Yet few bloggers can construct an
interesting or coherent sentence. My advice to novices has always been: If you can’t write,
don’t, at least in public. Please, think of the young and defenseless.
Look at the
blog/website list to the left. At least four of those links represent writers
who have died since Anecdotal Evidence was launched – David Myers, Clive James,
Sir Roger Scruton and John Simon. Each had Hazlitt’s “throb of pleasure in his
heart” and wished to share it. I sometimes think the primal explanation for
wishing to write can be summarized as: “Look at me! Look at me!” In his
introduction to Latest Readings (Yale
University Press, 2015), Clive James writes of the writers who haunt his book,
including Dr. Johnson, and says of them:
“Piled up,
the books they wrote are not a necropolis. They are an arcadian pavilion with
an infinite set of glittering, mirrored doorways to the unknown: which seems
dark to us only because we will not be in it. We won’t be taking our knowledge
any further, but it brought us this far.”
2 comments:
I first came to your blog from the list down the margin of "Laudator temporis acti" -- the year was certainly 2006, though I didn't know at the time you'd only just begun. It seemed to me you knew what you were doing. It took a while longer for me to get the daily habit: at first I'd wait a week or so and binge on the recent accumulation. And I was suspicious of the technology involved, so that I wondered: Should I be enjoying this so much? Happily the answer became clear to me and it was Yes.
Reminds me of:
On the Internet, you read the fierce posts of political and
ideological writers and wonder, Why do so many young bloggers sound
like hyenas laughing in the dark? Maybe it's because there's no old
hand at the next desk to turn and say, "Son, being an enraged,
profane, unmoderated, unmediated, hit-loving, trash-talking rage
monkey is no way to go through life."
-- Peggy Noonan, "Youth Has Outlived Its Usefulness", The Wall Street
Journal, July 16th, 2010
One of the lovely things about the interweb is the complete freedom to
post obscure, intractable, thoroughly off-putting essays, revelling in
the fact that even if 99.9999 per cent of humanity really doesn’t want
to read e.g. a rambling 12,000 word reflection on some little-known
artist by a totally unknown commentator - a perfectly legitimate point
of view, obviously - well, there’s still the outside chance that
someone out there, somewhere, actually will want to read it. And
sometimes just the prospect of connecting, probably anonymously and
certainly at a great distance, with that one other person is what
makes the whole project worthwhile.
-- a now-vanished post at Samizdata dot net
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