So, I’ve finally got the design working (more or less) so let’s see if I can be more diligent about using this regularly, when I’ve got an audience to satisfy my gross narcissism, than I am with physical diaries. I’ve always thought I /should/ have a diary of some sort because of something I read in Charles Taylor a few years back. He said that Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu,” usually translated “Remembrances of Things Past” might be better rendered “The Recovery of Lost Time.” We’ve all got these big-picture narratives of our lives we keep tucked in the backs of our heads, and parts of our lives that can’t be integrated into that narrative are, in a very real sense, “lost” years, time ceded to people we’ve stopped being. That makes the diarist a sort of retro-Scherezade, making up stories to stave off death… but from behind, rather than in the future.
A blog, of course, is not a private diary. That means there’s some thoughts that sure as hell aren’t going to get aired, but I don’t know that it’s any less effective for it. We like to buy into this “myth of a real me,” I think. Who you are depends at least in part on who you’re with, but it pleases us to think that the identity we wear for our own benefit, alone in a dark room or whatever, is the special “real” one. Well, bullshit. Even a person deliberately putting up a facade for others is a real person putting up a facade. And just /that/ facade, an intensely personal creation if there ever was one.
Anyway, I suppose I’m on the bloggy-bandwagon now, so I’ll use this space for both personal reflections and, when I get bored with navel gazing, more generic thoughts that aren’t ready to plug into an essay or some such thing. Maybe having an audience (or, more realistically, an imagined audience) for my life will motivate me to be more interesting. I’ll be cheating for the next month, though: I’ll be in Europe for the next month, and it can be interesting so that I don’t have to be. With any luck, I’ll be able to check in via laptop with some frequency.
