'To Express It As Nearly As I Can'

Over the weekend I remembered a blog I visited fairly often during my early ventures into the blogosphere. This would be around 2006, the year I launched Anecdotal Evidence. The proprietor and I exchanged a few emails. He was a reader though his blog was not exclusively devoted to books. Rather, his formula was more like “this is what happened in my life today.” That can be deadly in the wrong hands but he had a modest writing gift, a fairly interesting mind and didn’t seem criminally solipsistic. He had read Arthur Koestler. I looked and his blog was gone. He left nothing behind but a few references elsewhere. I’ve seen this happen before. The blog disappears or the most recent post dates from 2017, with no explanation, abandoned like an unwanted litter of puppies. 

If it was his doing, that’s sad but not evidence of malice. Writing online is highly perishable, easy prey for motivated maniacs. Good to remember that blogging is a hobby, a minor one like tatting or collecting beer cans. It shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But in those early days I discovered in myself a faint trace of utopianism, a tendency I otherwise find appalling. Blogging seemed like a promising way to bring like-minded people together, the digital analogue of the group-hug. At the smallest scale, this remains the case. I’ve met some bright, sane people thanks to the blog, and we try to stay in touch. Auden describes those early naïve hopes in the final stanza of his best-known poem:

 

“Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages . . .”

 

Not all of us are “Just” but a handful of good blogs qualify as “Ironic points of light.” William Hazlitt admired the skill of “The Indian Jugglers” (Table Talk, 1828), at the same time envying their mastery and doubting his own. Blogging is a form of juggling:

 

“What have I been doing all my life! Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for all my labour and pains! Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? . . . The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow [ the juggler, or a writer we admire] can do. . . . What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. I endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a subject, and to express it as nearly as I can.”