'To Furnish Out an Essay'

As  good as any explanation I’ve read for maintaining a blog long after the vogue for blogging has evaporated: 

“He that questions his abilities to arrange the dissimilar parts of an extensive plan, or fears to be lost in a complicated system, may yet hope to adjust a few pages without perplexity; and if, when he turns over the repositories of his memory, he finds his collection too small for a volume, he may yet have enough to furnish out an essay.”

 

A reader asks why I write something daily when I have, at most, a few hundred readers. That’s a few hundred more than I ever expected, and I don’t, for the most part, write for them. An honest writer will admit he writes to please himself (which occasionally means earning a few bucks, though not in this case). It can be a benign form of egotism. No one is forced to read your words. Writing this way is like carving your name in the bark of a tree deep in the woods: “I am here.” Some will find that a comfort; others, an annoyance; most will never see it. The rest is momentum.

 

The passage quoted above is from the first of The Rambler essays, published on this date, March 20, in 1750. Johnson would publish an essay every Tuesday and Saturday for the next two years – 207 in all. He would subsequently write two other sets of essays, The Adventurer and The Idler, but The Rambler is his deepest work. Though seldom confessional in the modern sense, these essays reveal the conflicted, compassionate, massively learned Johnson we have come to know. W. Jackson Bate calls them “an extended prose application of 'The Vanity of Human Wishes.'" Johnson is ever a moralist but we accept him in that role because he never excludes himself from judgment. His is the voice of fallible, ever-suffering humanity. His concluding words in the first Rambler are characteristic:

 

“And if he finds, with all his industry, and all his artifices, that he cannot deserve regard, or cannot attain it, he may let the design fall at once, and, without injury to others or himself, retire to amusements of greater pleasure, or to studies of better prospect.”