Friday, February 03, 2006
A rationale for blogging?
I started reading The Education of Henry Adams last night. He writes:
"Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his (and her) own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs."
(pp.4-5, Houghton Mifflin 1918, I've added the words in italics)
This seems to me to encapsulate why writers write, and why readers read, both books and now blogs. Our internal worlds are huge and varied (and we are the stars, the main attractions), and not usually shared with others. Books offer a chance to move through someone else's universe. Blogs do too, in miniature.
"Although every one cannot be a Gargantua-Napoleon-Bismarck and walk off with the great bells of Notre Dame, every one must bear his (and her) own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs."
(pp.4-5, Houghton Mifflin 1918, I've added the words in italics)
This seems to me to encapsulate why writers write, and why readers read, both books and now blogs. Our internal worlds are huge and varied (and we are the stars, the main attractions), and not usually shared with others. Books offer a chance to move through someone else's universe. Blogs do too, in miniature.
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As of now I will have to stop reading this wonderful blog upon which I seem to have stumbled across; since my Abebooks.com basket if full to bursting with assortments of books whose titles I have picked up in just the small amount of this blog I've been reading are so um, assorted, that I live in fear that their chemical makeup will reject one another and fuse into a supercreature bent upon the overthrow of the earth itself!
Mind you the world might need a good overthrown round now, but still I'd feel guilty and there it is.
Also as an actual comment I am reminded of the start words for the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy website which states, "The website is wonderful new invention that allows people you neither know nor care about to tell you what they had for breakfst this morning without all that tedious mucking about in the postal service.
Mind you the world might need a good overthrown round now, but still I'd feel guilty and there it is.
Also as an actual comment I am reminded of the start words for the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy website which states, "The website is wonderful new invention that allows people you neither know nor care about to tell you what they had for breakfst this morning without all that tedious mucking about in the postal service.
Thanks for your comments, I'm 1)glad you found me, 2)even more glad you are following up with my reading suggestions, and 3)most happy to read your appropriate quote from the HHGTTG site. Blogging falls somewhere between stealthily keeping one's private diary and shouting one's business from a streetcorner soapbox.
I looked at your blog - most interesting. Favorite trucking song of all time: "Looking at the World Through a Windshield" by Son Volt. Great driving song...
I looked at your blog - most interesting. Favorite trucking song of all time: "Looking at the World Through a Windshield" by Son Volt. Great driving song...
I once knew someone who said they wanted to print up a bunch of t-shirts with obscure quotes on them, just to see who would recognize what they were from. I still might do that...
By the by, my favorite trucking song: I Don't Care If It Rains or Freezes Long as I Got My Plastic Jesus (Sittin' on the Dashboard of My Car) It's about a car, but it's definitely a trucking song.
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By the by, my favorite trucking song: I Don't Care If It Rains or Freezes Long as I Got My Plastic Jesus (Sittin' on the Dashboard of My Car) It's about a car, but it's definitely a trucking song.
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