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What If?

Imagine Michel de Montaigne under an 800-word limit. I don’t mean to compare my little pieces or myself to the one who started us on sharing personal reflections. Yet the thought keeps coming back. Montaigne would have (a) chafed against a limit so artificial, (b) tossed it aside disdainfully, or (c) taken to it comfortably. All we know for sure is that, in his case, rage or indignation would not have been factors.

I can’t say that Montaigne “inspired” these efforts, but he did establish the Self as a subject worthy of others’ attention. The time and space we inhabit is not comparable to his: ambient warfare and neighborhood atrocities his only distraction, he had a castle tower and tons of time. We of the twenty-first century might have fixed his gallstones for him, but could never have made conditions propitious for economic indifference or the seclusion we all say we crave, but never make for ourselves.

Personally I like the 800-word form. It came from the editor who carried my first blog – the one about Laurent Gbagbo which follows. I was neither pro nor con, just wanted to surface the idea. Conformity to the form was the price of doing so. As I wrote it on April 5, 2011, I thought, “Whoa, this actually suits me.” No straightjacket, no Procrustean beds. Something about it was pleasing, and led me to write more. I never sought or received money for any blogs, nor frankly even wide readership. Having them “out there” (read: preserved and accessible) was the main motivation. This may sound coy, but it’s true.

A blog is not an “essai,” it’s just a blog. As one friend put it to me, it’s an hors d’oeuvre. He didn’t mean to trivialize my content, nor did I take it that way. An hors d’oeuvre whets the appetite. Even at their most contemplative and human moments, people “whet” appetites (that is, create them), so as later to sate them. Satiation is an elusive goal, so we often are left with wanting, more than having, and it seems we almost like it that way. Yes, it’s a perversion, but every vice has its corresponding virtue, and humans deal with both, all the time. The corresponding virtue here is movement and dynamism. We are not meant to be fixed in time and space. We have plane tickets, Skype, tele-this and tele-that which Montaigne never needed or lacked. See Emily Dickinson on this subject.

The blog form has something to do with friendship, which is a very high value to me, higher anyway than freedom or the type of morality that can be checked by bar code. Friendship’s dialogues are too seldom captured, its cherishable moments too easily dispelled. “Too seldom” and “too easily” only in the sense of wanting to get my druthers, and I don’t always get those. So I whet, then I see about satiation.

Interaction takes place in time and space, and works best when interlocutors can converse in a room. The things you do together can be chronicled or recorded, but what you say will define, establish, and perpetuate the friendship. It defies permanence, though, and is not usually available to others. I’m not advocating exhibitionism.

Setting these conversational moments in amber (the blog) does not make up a noticeable human advancement, but it does scratch an itch.

Blogs to me have to do with how people spend time together, including a moment together with a reader I may never know. The 800-word limit somehow assures that the blog gets written and, more importantly, thought. The conversations themselves are records of what we think, and “to think” – well, enough centuries and energies have gone into figuring out the nature of that. As with our biologies, the specialists may have reason to understand them, the rest of us just put them to use when we’re lucky and things work.

Make what you will of these reflections. Some are topical, others non-temporal observations. I hope they may lighten moments on a plane or in a waiting room. Receive them with my cordial thanks. If I say “I don’t need you to read these,“ I am being permissive, not dismissive. I don’t exaggerate the importance of “my world” but I welcome you to enter it.

For me, a blog is a thought. It is more pleasing to have a thought than to postpone it. Classical theater had enormous suspense and appeal, more for what it could not and did not say, than what it said. Nowadays we say nearly anything, but the 800-word limit removes the helium and gets us on a single topic for the time span of a thought. Limits thereby ease and comfort us. And there go my 799 words, so I guess I’ll stop.