And it isn't even Lent yet. Why?
Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things . . . .
And when a writer stoops to 'kinda,' that too is perhaps an indication that it is time to hang up the keyboard.
The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.
Sullivan here touches upon a serious problem, that of time apportionment as between serious writing and blogging, which tends to be scribbling of a more ephemeral sort. (If truth be told, almost everything that almost all of us will ever write is of no lasting significance; so it's almost all of it ephemeral scribbling.)
I think it is possible to balance the two if one is willing to write well and in depth about important topics that transcend the fads, fancies, and fatuities of the moment, and eschew the need to post many times per day or even daily. Some of what I write on this blog gets reworked for serious publication. In this way my blogging aids my serious writing. It also aids it by making it less 'academic.' The blogger is forced by his chosen medium to be pithy and direct.
I can't see myself quitting as long as health and eyesight hold out. Blogging is just too deeply satisfying.
For one thing it satisfies the need to teach of someone who hated most classroom teaching. Philosophy is a magnificent, beautiful, and noble thing, but it is wasted on the typical undergraduate. In a class of 35, five might be worth teaching. And I taught at good schools. That is one of the reasons I resigned a tenured position at the age of 41. If you are reading this, you want to be here, and I'm glad to have you.
Second, blogging attracts the like-minded. Isolation is relieved and friendships are made, the genuine friendships of spiritual affinity as opposed to the superficial ones of mere propinquity. Ralph Waldo Emerson would have been a blogger for sure. "The good of publishing one's thoughts is that of hooking you to like-minded men, and of giving to men whom you value . . . one hour of stimulated thought." (Bliss Perry, The Heart of Emerson's Journals, p. 94.)
Third, blogging is superior to private journal writing because the publicity of it forces one to develop one's ideas more carefully and more thoroughly.
Fourth, the blogger has a reach that far exceeds that of the person who publishes in conventional ways.
Recent Comments