Friends and relatives, people whose judgment I actually trust, have urged me to move Anecdotal Evidence from Blogger to Substack and I don’t understand why. All I need is a place to write, the “platform” is of no importance. I’d do this in a notebook, like in the old days, if nothing else were available. Blogger is temperamental but after almost twenty years I’ve learned her funny little ways. As in a long, mostly happy marriage, one gets comfortable. I think of Michael Oakeshott’s definition of being conservative:
“. . . to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
I didn’t retire after almost half a century as a newspaper reporter and science writer – a professional -- in order to “monetize.”
In 1903, G.K. Chesterton wrote a brief monograph on Robert Browning as part of
the English Men of Letters series. In Chapter IV, “Browning in Italy,” Chesterton
describes the poet’s devotion to painting, his dedication to “the obstetrics of
art,” which enabled him to write poems about painters and their work:
“He was, in other words,
what is called an amateur. The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities
of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the
meaning of passion. Nor is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the
word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire
and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises it
without any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without any hope of
doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other
man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in this strict sense a strenuous
amateur. He tried and practised in the course of his life half a hundred things
at which he can never have even for a moment expected to succeed.”
Even a professional can be
an amateur.
5 comments:
Thanks for the reference to Chesterton's monograph. He is one of my favorite authors, always worth reading.
Chesterton somewhere wrote that "Whatever is worth doing, is worth doing badly." I no longer remember where I read this (certainly in his own writings--I have seen it quoted also).
As someone who appreciates the open web and is worried about its diminishment (and who, let's be honest, always likes getting stuff without paying for it), I'm glad to be able to read Anecdotal Evidence "in the open", without having to register, subscribe, renew etc.
Please don't to go to Substack. All Substacks look alike, and blend together and disappear into white blankness. To my mind, Anecdotal Evidence is one with its brown, patterned wallpaper and beige background. Just as some books we love, will always live for us in the the covers they wore when we first met them.
I agree with Faze.
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