The End of the Beginning?

Or the beginning of the end? Don't know yet, but today marks the end of 365 days of writing this blog. I started it with this quotation:

“These days I must take the world in small and carefully measured doses, it is a sort of homeopathic cure I am undergoing, though I am not certain what this cure is meant to mend.” (John Banville, from ‘The Sea,” p. 143 of 195 pages, Vintage Paperback edition, 2005.)

I feel that no less now than then and the blog has been, in its way a measured dose, ‘a sort of homeopathic cure,’ although I am not able to say whether I’m any better for the treatment.

In any case, over the past twelve months, I’ve written almost every day, written a total of almost 200,000 words; perhaps ‘a sound and fury signifying nothing.' (The Tempest like King Lear are works one is not advised to think about too closely in old age.) It has been more interesting than I had expected and more demanding. I found myself thinking about possible subjects from the time I got up in the morning until I found one. Rarely did I have more than one in mind, but not infrequently, one would suddenly present itself to me around 5 in the afternoon. And that constant need to focus both led me out of myself and led me away from the things I usually focus on.

It’s not like writing a journal, where you can blather on all you want about anything, or as little as you want about nothing because nobody is ever going to read it. I’ve never been a journal writer except for brief periods, such as a particularly interesting trip. A blog isn’t a journal. Somebody out there, it turns out, is reading it, so you have to at least attend to the idea of an audience, even if you don’t exactly know who the audience is. It’s a very strange kind of writing. I like it enough to keep on doing it, but I don’t like it enough to keep on doing it every day. So I’ll be posting less frequently in the days to come and see how that feels. Thanks for reading during the past year. I hope we’ve both learned something.