Thought for the Day?

So, I realised I'm going nowhere with this blogging business. It's not that I don't have things to say, it's just that, frankly, they're not relevant. Nevertheless, for filler or otherwise, I'll do some post soon on my recent adventures in Chicago over Holy Week/Spring Break.

In the meantime, I'm going to attach a thought for the day, provided by Théophile Gautier (A photo of whom I've attached at the top), famous French poet, dramatist, etc. of the fin de siècle-ish period. Though I can't say I've read many of Théophile's works (only the journal of his travel in Spain) I was particularly attracted to this rather long bit:

"One of the great drawbacks of modern life is the lack of unexpectedness and of adventures; everything is so well regulated, so well aranged, so well conducted that the element of chance is eliminated. With another century of improvement, every one of us will be able to see from his birth everything that will happen to him to the day of his death. The human will will be entirely annhililated; there will be no more crime, no more virtue, no more individuality, no more originality. No one will be able to distinguish a Russian from a Spaniard, an Englishman from a Chinaman, a Frenchman from an American. People will not even be able to recognise one another, for everybody will look alike. Then an immense weariness will fall upon the universe, and suicide will decimate the population of earth, for the chief motive of life, curiosity, will have been extinguished."

Ack.

To blog or not to blog, that was the question.

Another apt title for this post would have been "Why I Write," though that would have been ripping off of a nice little essay by George Orwell, who happens to be, in a way, the inspiration for this post. And perhaps a bit for this blog in general.

See, Orwell believes there to be four reasons for people writing: sheer egoism (people who like to hear themselves speak, or, rather, read what they write (?) ), esthetic enthusiasm (that is, for the beauty of it), historical impulse, and political purpose (as Orwell puts it, to "push the world in a certain direction"). Even though I may enjoy sharing my opinions on things, I would be fooling myself if I were to believe that anyone is really going to read a blog by some faceless internet writer and change their minds about the world, so the forth option is just about nixed. I do, however, greatly enjoy hearing myself talk, as I enjoy the beauty of words, and, as Orwell puts it, I "desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity." My hope is that, somehow, someone may enjoy reading what I write as much as I enjoy writing it, and, perhaps, that they glean some truth from it.

Starting a blog was actually my father's suggestion (at least I know I'll have one reader...). He, for whatever reason, enjoys what I write to him in my often all-to-lengthy emails. I suppose that's one point for esthetic enthusiasm.

Now, I couldn't finish this my first post without a disclaimer detailing what exactly I think about blogs. I find them, in many ways, a nasty byproduct of a narcissistic, anonymous, throwaway culture. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, and there is no way on Earth that anyone really cares what many of these people (including, I suppose, myself) have to say. There was a point, long ago (this is the anachronism taking over) when people would write things worth writing. Reflections on God, the nature of things, histories. Perhaps it's an accurate reflection of just how full of worthless refuse our modern age has become when people share their oft-uneducated and ill thought-out opinions on a vast web of anonymity, as a bookseller might toss so many trashy romance novels into the dumpster behind his store.

My hope is that this blog doesn't become one of those dumpster-bound romance novels.