From Essays After Montaigne
I take my first Argument of fortune: All are alike unto me: And I never purpose to handle them throughly: For there is nothing wherein I can perceive the full perfection: Which they doe not that promise to shew it us. Of a hundred parts and visages that every thing hath, I take one, which sometimes I slightly runne over, and other times but cursorily glance at.
Each motion sheweth and discovereth what we are. The very same minde of Cæsar we see in directing, marshalling, and setting the battel of Pharsalia, is likewise seene to order, dispose, and contrive idle, trifling and amorous devices. We judge of a horse not only by seeing him ridden, and cunningly managed, but also by seeing him trot or pace; yea, if we but looke upon him as he stands in the stable. Amongst the functions of the soule, some are but meane and base. He that seeth her no further, can never know her thorowly.
Yesterday morning, as I was walking from the subway to my office, I heard a man behind me talking a little louder than the average pedestrian on 42nd Street. His voice was clear and urgent, like he was carefully explaining something that was important to him. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed that there was no one around him that he could be talking to, and another glance confirmed that he wasn't talking on a cell phone either. Because he was walking behind me and speaking so clearly, I was able to hear most of what he was saying:
The thing is that if you hear a song a bunch of times you lose the memory of the first time you heard it. If you heard a song a couple of times in 1965 and you hear it again now, you'll remember exactly what it was like when you first heard it. But if you've heard "Let It Be" 600 times, that'll erase the memory of the first time you heard it. What they should do instead of playing the top twenty, they should play numbers twenty through fifty. Besides hearing some great music, it would be fascinating for what it did to your memory.
As I listened, I wished that he had a Weblog. This is a conversation in which I'd love to take part. I would talk about listening to Have A Nice Decade; about the Proustian evocations that it has inspired (even in some cases--like "Rock the Boat"--where I've heard the song many, many times); and about the disorienting experience of hearing songs that I forgot I even knew. But I didn't want to engage this unknown man with a crazed look in his eyes and frayed clothing in an actual conversation right there on the street. A Weblog would give his ideas the hearing they deserve, free from the context of his appearance.
I started this Weblog almost a year ago as a forum within which to learn to express myself. It has allowed me the comfort both to explore and express my emotions and to indulge my desire for ponderous verbosity, while minimizing the challenges generally associated with face-to-face interaction. Proust's narrator has no advantage over me in being highly strung or in being laboriously philosophical, but, unlike him, I hadn't been able to reveal those facets of myself to anyone else. I created this for just that purpose, and lately, I've specifically used it as a means of exploring Montaigne's essays and, occasionally, to augment my therapy. Of a hundred visages of Weblogging, I have taken two or three. But there are so many other visages to be taken, from a simple airing of opinions and ideas to a professional-quality publication; from underground theology to searing nihilism; from the amusing to the poignant; from hope to whimsy to vitriol. There are monologues, dialogues, and free-for-alls, and they're so well-written. And then there's the Reverse Cowgirl.
In a recent entry, Susannah (the Reverse Cowgirl) explains the ways in which she has been creative with both the form and the content of her Weblog, and she always makes it seem effortless and off-the-cuff (though I recently discovered just how difficult what she does actually is). In the same entry, she takes Jeff Jarvis to task for a particularly ill-advised entry in his Weblog about AOL's plan to provide Weblogs to its customers, in which he appoints himself (apparently without irony) a member of "a privileged council of blogging elders." He goes on to proclaim: "For us to be successful, we also need AOL's blogs to be part of our world." I can't speak for Jeff, but for me, everything that exists is part of my world. So what does he mean by "our world"? I didn't know we had the ability to vote AOL off of the planet (if we had only known...). And who is this "we"? What would it mean for "us" to be successful? As Susannah rightly points out, "[t]he beauty of blogging is in its anarchic nature, not as one more capitalist-driven vehicle for which arriving means being able to link directly to People." Weblogging is so many things to so many people in so many places that there's very little sense in speaking of a "blogging community" and absolutely no sense in speaking of a community that has elders or leaders.
Reading Jeff's entry, I'm reminded of all the failed visionaries and leaders without followers who've told us how the world will be; how everything can be seen as part of some inexorable progress (social, political, technical, or theological) that they've discovered. But the world isn't an orderly progression, and any human social activity involving more than a handful of people isn't a movement governed by any principles or expressing a common yearning. Sometimes, large numbers of people do similar things at the same time, and it looks to the impatient of motivated observer like a movement, but looked at closely and realistically, it's just a bunch of people pursuing their own ends by similar means. Jeff may sneer at "Aunt Esther's cat blog," but his Weblog is no more or less a Weblog. If someone writes things and posts them on the Web, it's a Weblog (and they've succeeded). Among the functions of Weblogs, some are but mean and base. He that sees them no further, can never know them thoroughly and can't proclaim himself an elder of the Weblogging community he has invented.
8:04:27 AM 
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