It’s been a while now, but I think it’s time to try to get things moving again around here.
It’s difficult when the Muse goes silent. You freeze up as you approach the blank page. You tell yourself you’ve said everything you have to say, and don’t want to repeat yourself just for the sake of writing something. You see that others have already covered — smothered! — the topics you might find worth remarking on. And so on. Little by little, you get out of the habit and practice of writing — and as with anything else, starting up again gets harder as the muscles atrophy. I’ve slacked off before, but this is the longest I’ve ever let things slide since I started this blog more than 20 years (and 5,379 posts) ago.
Meanwhile, I’m older — seventy now — and it’s harder to stay on top of the things that need taking care of from hour to hour and day to day. I’ve also put aside more time each day for reading; it seemed to me that I needed, for a while at least, to prioritize study over output.
But the real worry, and I think this is a big part of what made it tempting for me to just let the blog lie idle, is that I’d begun to wonder if I can really think as well as I used to.
Eric Hoffer confronted this doubt at the age of seventy-two. and the result was his book Before the Sabbath, for which he decided, as he described it, “to force myself over the period over a period of several months to sluice my mind the way I had sluiced dirt in my gold-hunting days, using a daily diary as a sluicebox to trap whatever flakes of insight might turn up”. The book was his last, but the sluicing was fruitful, and turned up more than a few flakes of gold.
Mind you, I’m no Eric Hoffer — but then again, I’m not quite seventy-two, either, and I think doing some sluicing of my own might still be well worth the effort. At the very least, it would be good to get back into the habit of setting something down on the page – even if it’s just brief daily comments. (I am also long overdue for an update to the Pilgrim’s Progress series I began seven years ago, but that is a more substantial task, and may take me a little while.)
Fortunately, there’s no shortage of material in what John Derbyshire used to call “the passing charivari” — for example, our failed adventure in the Middle East; the Jason Arday debacle; the sudden discovery, by argumentative midwits on social media, of the insights of Carl Schmitt; the accelerating weirdness of AI and its penetration into every aspect of life; the ongoing conquest of Europe and the question of whether its people will awaken; the emergence of hard-core Socialism and Communism as a powerful political faction in the U.S., and the resulting power-struggles within the Democratic Party; the emergence, thanks to AI, of the previously arcane question of the nature of consciousness (which is now a clamant social and cultural issue); the apparent reawaking of religiosity in the West as the failings of secular materialism become more and more obvious; and much, much more.
Thanks, in advance, to any of you who will still be dropping by after such a long dry-spell. I appreciate it.
2 Comments
Half cups quinoa, black beans, one and a half tablespoons of ground flaxseed I’ve found works, physically for me works tolerably well.
Too, I’ve found, some of my keenest insights have arrived while in a seated position.
Your mileage may vary Ol Pal.
Great to see that you are back. I checked every morning hoping for new post, and I finally found one.
On the matter of aging, when you hit my age, 80, you will look back on 70 or even 75 as golden eras. You are right in stating that the words do not flow onto the page as easily. And with time, the concentration required for reading, especially of demanding texts, also begins to wane, and those long hours spent with books are a thing of the past. A big part of this is the decline in the quality of sleep, even after days of exercise and activity. Too often, you set yourself up in a comfortable chair with a book in which you have a great interest, begin to read, and end up nodding off. As for the sense that one does not think as well as in the past, it is, in my experience, partly a reflection of an awareness that nothing is as clear or evident as it once was, which one could take either as a sign of mental enfeeblement or, more positively, of greater wisdom.