Greetings and Apologies

            Well, hello there reader! It’s very good of you to show up. I, unfortunately, am the author of this humble blog… and, if you’ll please believe me, I’m no happier about that fact than you are. I? Author? What audacity! What silliness! What self-indulgent drivel is all of this nonsense going to turn out to be? We tried, we really did, we wanted to get somebody else to write the blog for us. After all, there’s nobody in the world less qualified for this sort of thing than our humble author. He tries his best, or at least he says he tries his best, which I guess amounts to the same thing. Six of one, baker’s dozen of the other, kind of thing. We tried, really we did. Best to let somebody well-qualified put words in our mouth, you know, so on, so on, etc, &c. There’s something terribly comforting, you know, in having someone else do all the heavy lifting, to tune into the deeper meanings and strivings of a soul trying to come to terms with—well, itself, among other things.

            But we did, we gave it the old college try, looking for somebody to speak for us. We’re really a very humble person, I assure you. And when I say that, I mean—although I know what deep waters we humans are always diving into any time we even begin to speak of meaning—that really, if we’re all very (dis?)honest with ourselves and try to be as self-sufficient as possible, we’ll quite naturally drive ourselves into the inviting delusion that the best thing for any of us to do is to keep ourselves to ourselves, a hand clamped firmly over the mouth and the other hand clapped just as firmly… eh, on a book! We tried, though. We tried, like so many others, to make the dead speak for us.

            These dead writers, you see, they’re not like us at all, they’re a special breed, they’re a type who can’t help but say their say, and damn the torpedoes! It’s very comforting, very reassuring, though, that they tend to say exactly what everyone else is already thinking. So we tried, we tried very hard and for a very long time, to let these writers do all of our talking for us, to us. BUT, and there are harmonies of infinity contained in that “but,” some of us can’t help ourselves. We grow up, lonely and distant in spite of ourselves (in order to spite ourselves?), driving others away because we can’t stand to see them go, carrying always within us that little thing, that sacred, holy thing, that hungry nostalgia, the ancient call of fall, flight, and forgetfulness. We are alone because we cannot stand to be alone, and more often than not we let ourselves believe we love it.

            But the books were there for us. Though everyone around us seemed to grow further and further away, we could always count on ink and paper to wrench us out of ourselves. In the struggle of a crafty old sea-dog striving to find home, in the anxieties of a young prince making idle mischief while staving off his destiny, in an ordinary young man’s three-week visit to a magic mountain that becomes a seven-year apprenticeship in nihilism and humanism, we discovered our truest selves. We tried very hard to hide ourselves from ourselves, but deep truths have a way of forcing themselves to the surface eventually. Words were always our first, our purest and greatest love; we always knew they would win out in the end.

Circuitous paths. Courtesy of Mr. Sterne.

            Life works itself out that way, you know? You wake up, on no particular morning, and you realize that it’s all been perfectly arranged for you, that there was an enormous yet somehow familiar hand meticulously arranging every step of the journey, and you hear a voice, quietly at first but growing louder, whispering your name. You find that you really are an instrument, a kind of woodwind, and that all your life up to now has been a process of infinite, infinitesimal construction. I feel the pressure, I sense the movement of the air, and so I can’t help but let the music out.

Again, I say, we tried. All of us. If someone else could speak for me, they would have done it by now. But there comes a time in life when you have to become what you really were all along. Who did I think I was kidding? After all, we've been around long enough to know what we’re about by now, surely.

And so, among other things, this blog is a record of a failed attempt. It is a monument to failed connections and failed communications. It is a chronicle of mistakes and miscalculations, both made in the past and in the future, all for your benefit, all for your amusement, all for love of you, dear, dear reader. For too long I tried my hand at taking myself seriously, and the results were… well, they were the kind of results that come from taking yourself seriously. So now I paint myself the clown, and I hope to be taken as one. Hopefully you will all have a great laugh at my expense; if I can give you that, maybe I’ll have justified, just a little bit, my existence, my misexistence. I hope that there’s much you can teach me, my beloved reader.