Для чего нам русский язык?

Многие студенты нашего университета изучают иностранные языки. Некоторые из них увлекаются соответствующими культурами и их искусством. Другие заботятся о своём будущем, представляя себе, что знание стратегический важных языков пригодится когда наступит время продавать себя на рынке рабочих мест. Это всё весьма логично, но в обоих этих сценариях, сам язык служит лишь свойством для достижение кокой-то цели. Не кажется ли вам, ребята, что такое отношение не очень благодарное?

При током отношении к языку, мы что-то теряем. Ведь язык – это не просто способ коммуникации мыслей, а скорее, это то, из чего наши мысли состоят. Мысли не передвигаются в языке. Они из него сделаны. И поскольку наши мысли только существуют благодаря тому языку в котором они рождаются, содержание и форма тех же мыслей зависят тоже от него. В этом смысле, каждый язык уникален, и мысли выраженные в одном языке не могут существовать в другом. Всё это значит, что каждый язык, на котором мы умеем говорить, дает нам возможность мыслить по новому.

Конечно, «я голоден», «I am hungry», и «ich habe Hunger» выражают одну и ту же идею. С другой стороны, я сейчас оставлю вас с двумя предложениями написанными Иссаком Бабелем в рассказе «Переход через Збруч». Попробуйте перевести их:

Оранжевое солнце катится по небу, как отрубленная голова, нежный свет загорается в ущельях туч, штандарты заката веют над нашими головами. Запах вчерашней крови и убитых лошадей каплет в вечернюю прохладу.

Apologies to anglophone readers.

The Adorno Monument in Frankfurt

The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one's own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate -Minima Moralia, p. 39

Tragic Pessimism

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent 'How lovely!' becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better [. . .] It is the sufferings of men that should be shared; the smallest step towards their pleasures is one towards the hardening of their pains.

-Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, pp. 25-26

There is something profoundly heroic in the refusal to be reconciled, in the insistence that one be allowed to remain inconsolable in the face of unspeakable horror. But the question that has been occupying me recently is whether this stance leaves any room for praxis, for emancipatory struggle. I fear that Adorno's stance is mere (if such a thing can be mere) dignified dying.

Insolubility

What does one do when confronted with a problem which brooks no response? Cope? But coping is absurd. If I cannot respond to a problem with praxis, or at least with the possibility of praxis, then it returns to face me with my own impotence in tow.

One of the lesser-known Freudian defense mechanisms is called intellectualization. I have relied heavily on it, as I continue to do now.

Fuck you, philosophy. You cannot offer me consolation now.

Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

-Ranier Maria Rilke, 1902

Carnival

I am amazed at the orgiastic outpouring of popular sentiment that is taking place outside my window. Who could imagine that our indifferent, distracted, hopelessly self-absorbed young people could care about something as abstract as politics? But that is just the issue - how is it possible to care this much about the victory of one candidate over another when the actual differences between them are so slight?

Doubtless, it is good that Obama has become the president of the United States. The alternative was far worse, and perhaps he really will infuse some remnant of youthful (since when is one young at 47?) idealism into American politics. But all the same, what explains this "shrieking into the heart of the night" that I have just heard outside my window? Surely it is not the shriek of implacable life, rending apart the bonds of all lifelessness and annihilating the dead world's blind resistance, as in Rilke's letter?

No, the title of my post is misleading: this eruption of mass feeling is utterly monological. There is no equivocation, no sideward glances, no travesty, no duality of creation and destruction. It is as if scripted - the mass voicing, on cue, of the masses' support of the status quo; the cathartic release of formerly undirected energy in a form perfectly safe from censure. This transgression is allowed, and we can transgress with a good conscience. That is, after all, the problem with Bakhtin's carnival. The authorities allowed the stupid peasants to have their fun a few times a year because the moment of anarchy merely perpetuated the permanent rule of king and pope.

In the Wake of a Long Absence

Can it really be that I have not written anything in this space in nearly three months? The state-dependence of memory never ceases to amaze me. A return to a place from which one has been absent is also a return to the time at which one saw that place last. In an instant, three months vanish, and I find myself in the same place. But where was I on the 9th of August? My imagination fails to construct a location in time, and I realize the falsehood of my impression. It was only a brief moment of nostalgia. In a 21-year-old life, three months cannot simply be ignored.

I've read a great many things in these last three months, although there always remains an element of doubt regarding the benefit of much of that reading. I fear that most of what I imagine is the benefit of reading a difficult book is merely the aesthetic experience of reading a difficult book. Even if an essay by Benjamin seems fascinating and provocative, I find it impossible to summarize it or even comment on it articulately to a friend. What did I gain from reading it? Some secret insight to which I will only be granted access later? Perhaps I will have an idea at some point in the future, and at that moment I will suddenly understand the essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Man?" - The thought working retroactively to make my memory of Benjamin's essay far richer and more significant.

I have to admit that it's happened before. It's an experience that has made me reflect on the nature of understanding - on the difference between understanding the semantic content of the words, clauses, and sentences that one has read and the greater meaning - implicit, holistic, ghostly in the way that it exists above and between the words - the meaning that strikes one in a moment of insight, sometimes months after putting down the text. If I try to remember the content of Beyond Good and Evil, nothing comes forth from the inscrutable, formless structure of my memory. But then I read a passage in Heidegger that denies our agency in the origination of thoughts, and I immediately recall the similar idea in Nietzsche. It's a hopeful thought - and I am wont to cling to any believable hopeful thought that - that nothing is ever actually lost in our memories.

But the two preceding paragraphs were utterly tangential, and so they owe their survival only to my permissiveness towards my proclivity for digressions. I am twenty-one years old - this is a fact which my conscience will not allow me to escape during my flights into abstraction and theory. There is a temporal core to truth, say Horkheimer and Adorno, and I agree with them totally (the time for that truth has not passed). This applies not only to epochs, but to individuals as well. Everything I write and everything I think is colored by my context. Nietzsche reminds us that every work of philosophy rests upon the psychology of its writer (usually a lonely, eccentric bachelor), and that all ethical systems aim for the legitimation of the ethicist's prejudices. To recall my earlier remark, then: when we cite individuals to quote "their" ideas - despite our skepticism towards outmoded Romantic notions of genius (that is, the ability to think in a way radically different from one's cultural and chronological compatriots) - all we are doing is uniting an idea presumably created by the discourse of many people with each other (even if that discourse coalesces inside an individual's head) with the prejudices and weaknesses of an individual author (but those are also not just his own - there is a temporal core to pathology as well).

The preceding was an appallingly byzantine sentence. I apologize to anyone who tries to parse it. I experience the desire to add footnotes to this entry, which suggests that academic stylistics are taking over my informal style, which I had thought impervious to the depredations of the Modern Language Association and the like. But I'm not going to pontificate on the stiltedness of academic prose or anything of the sort. One should consider one's critiques in context. It is all-too-easy to join in with a mob venting its bile at a target far less guilty than it presently seems. As a general ethical attitude, I should, with a few necessary exceptions, avoid condemning what is already commonly condemned. - This not to be contrary, but to discourage myself from joining into those terrible feedback loops in which one feels both righteous and comfortable in attacking someone/thing from within a mob. This is why, living in the United States, I tend to argue for Russia's perspective in discussions of geopolitics. There is, of course, not a little emotional attachment to the mythical lost garden of my childhood mixed into that as well, but I think that my rationalization, however divergent from my personal realities, is a useful ethical consideration.

If philosophers can shape profound ideas out of their longings and privations, then why can't I attempt something of the same - albeit more consciously. That an idea is borne in deception, or even that it is false as regards its explicit object, is not enough to invalidate it for other applications.

I will return now to the issue of my age, if only out of formal considerations. Why is it that I continue to think, despite knowing better, that loving someone confers a debt upon that person? The answer, I think, is that this applies validly to considerations of other "positive" relationships. In committing an act of kindness (permit me to rehabilitate the word commit), one is within one's rights to expect gratitude. If I want to become friends with someone, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that person to want to become friends with me. After all, I would not choose a totally incompatible person for friendship, and most people are only happy to make another friend. Romantic feelings are obviously different. Not only are they exclusive, but they are also not unequivocally positive, although they stubbornly continue to seem that way.

Thoughts on this issue continue to follow an economic logic: if I invest energy in having "positive" feelings for λ, then shouldn't I expect something in return - the other end of the transaction? But "positive" feelings are incommensurable. Although I can expect a person to be nicer to me because I have advanced the offer of friendship, I cannot do the same following an offer of romantic attachment. In fact, I can expect to be rather rudely spurned, or ignored, or, perhaps, laughed at.

Most people are perfectly willing to be friends with their inferiors (my fellow students do not seem to fear any effect on their reputation by taking on unflattering friends - perhaps because of the meaninglessness of most friendships). A lover, however, has to be good enough. If it is the comparative insignificance of gratitude or friendliness compared to the commitment involved in even the typically abortive romantic relationship, then I have found the answer to my question, and I must admit that any fool could have told me that. Indeed, this is a perfectly adequate answer, if not a satisfying one. Loving does not entitle one to recompense, either from the object of love or from the universe as a whole. Put frankly, no one gives a fuck. Unrequited love is an absurd screaming into a vacuum.


And so we seek the consolation of philosophy.

Problems of freedom

I am an ascetic. - Am I therefore also a masochist? "He who possesses is possessed." And yet, the idea occurs as early as Nietzsche that asceticism is cruelty turned inward; it is the tyranny of the soul over the body, which it denies as its true source. And yet there come times when one recoils in horror at the thought that one is nothing more than the moment of meat's becoming aware of itself. One rediscovers the appeal of the renunciation that comes with the idea that I am something immaterial and transcendent, imprisoned in this transient, weak, corruptible flesh - the word flesh itself disgusts me. But reflection perpetuates this divide, while experience reconciles the opposing substances and merges them back into a single awareness turned outward. Reflection is a corrosive force - after all, reflection on the foreignness of one's own body soon leads to reflection on the foreignness of some mental habit or other, the non-essentialness of some character trait/flaw. One begins to peel away the layers of one's personality, seeking the core, only to discover the nothingness of one's ego. Aside from the layers, which are all contingent, there is nothing there. People say more than they realize with the proverb "the eyes are the window to the soul." The black mirror of the pupil is the I itself - glass, transparent and opaque all at once, reflecting the outside world in its own nothingness. Between the falsehood of the outside and the nonexistence of the inside, what remains? Shifting illusions? Whence comes the concept of truth?

A related thought: if universality - the attempt to free oneself from all illusions of a particular point of view - resolves into nothingness, the point of view from nowhere, then how far can one move from the mire of one's subjectivity into the realm that exists between two subjects? Can anything be said, or is each word non-identical with its repetition?

To be continued in a more lucid state of mind.

Inchoate Thought

ripening without ripeness
movement without arrival
becoming without being

Growing Up

Some days, the collective weight of all the stupid banalities of life is almost enough to break the surface of one's worthless day-to-day existence and force a transformative change, a leap into the abyss, which one knows is filled with hope because one knows nothing about its contents.

But only almost.

Going Camping

Consider for a moment the tragic arrangement of life: the necessity of working away one's youth in order to secure one's survival in old age. Surely the progress accomplished over thousands of years could do something to liberate human beings from the tyranny of nature, and allow them to do what they want - that dream of emancipation, whose continued failure to materialize constitutes the ultimate, unjustifiable failure of capitalism.

Now consider the possibility that people have contrived a partial remedy for this disappointment. They invented the modern university so that young people on the threshold of adulthood would be permitted four years of nearly unstructured enjoyment before relinquishing their agency and submitting themselves to the economy. College as vacation from the outside world, paid for with a lifetime of work. Each generation saves for a lifetime to give their progeny this gift. And the children, having enjoyed the fruits of their parents' labor must repay it for the next generation. Asking for more than this when your parents have given so much so that you could have your four years of idle fun - that is the height of immodesty. Small wonder that those who try to evade entry into the workforce by extending their tenure as students earn the contempt of others. Rather than celebrating the success of the few, the many condemn them for emphasizing the non-necessity of the majority's sacrifice.

The most satisfying part of this model is that it explains why college is so easy - why no one seems to mind (or admit) that even in the allegedly rigorous universities, dedicated students find ample time for enjoyment - far more than in the 'real world' of forty-hour work weeks. Everyone knows, and yet no one acknowledges, that college is one part work and three parts fun. It is a time for acceptable transgressions - even expected ones, in the manner of the Spartan youths.

There is the other side, of course - that by the arbitrary demands of its bureaucratic systems, the caprices of professors, the student learns to jump through hoops like a good white-collar worker. The college years are not a total loss for society.

Methodology

In Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes of the inevitable incompleteness of any theory of the postmodern. Postmodernism, whether characterized, as with Lyotard, by the end of "master narratives," or, with Jameson, by the disappearance of the historicity of the modern age, is still described by those experiencing and observing it in narrative or historical terms (pp. xi-xii). But this seems unavoidable. For how else to conceptualize postmodernity (I struggle against the desire to write 'postmodern age'), except as a distinct period, differentiated from those that came before it by whatever peculiarities may be most relevant, but above all, perhaps, by its currentness. It seems that our ordinary conception of time inevitably connects the postmodern to the past as the latest in a series of discrete steps. However diffuse it is, by calling it postmodernism - by imagining it at all - we give it coherence, for we cannot imagine what has no form and no discernable characteristics.

The theoretical approaches characteristic of postmodernity call into question such concepts as narrative and truth. The questioning of truth, in turn, inevitably pulls logic from its pedestal. Given that the persuasiveness of an argument is based largely upon the audience's evaluation of the truth of its premises and the cogency of its logical progression, as well as the centrality of argument in theory, the questions raised by postmodern theory deprive it of its own justification. What is the value of theory in a world of multiplicities, or of argument in the absence of truth?

This contradiction does not, however, lead to a facile dismissal of postmodern theory. I am struck and disturbed by the facility with which my fellow university students dismiss wholesale such modes thought as philosophy or postmodernism. Such contempt reveals complete disbelief in the legitimacy of academic study in these areas and raises a variety of questions both about those responsible for such statements and regarding the place of non-empirical thought in this society. But that is matter for another discussion. In terms of the issue at hand, the contradiction at the heart of postmodern theory establishes at the very beginning that the belief in logic is both untenable and necessary. Logic seems to hold an innate attraction for people, and it is difficult, if not impossible to conceive or persuasive communication without it. If there is a way to articulate the postmodern condition without logic, and without immediately imposing the necessity of silence, then such a way has not yet been found. What remains, then, is that postmodern theory can only be communicated through logical argumentation, but the jarring incongruousness of form and content remind all involved that logic and argument themselves are under scrutiny. The related problem of objectivity - that such an idea can no longer seriously be entertained, although a theory that attempts to describe the experience of multiple people or the characteristics of a society inevitably assumes a perspective above the subjectivity of those it describes - is also only an issue of form. Nothing expressed by postmodern theory can be said to hold for all conditions, or even, perhaps, for all the individuals, or for all the states of a given individual, within the society that it describes. The method is sub-optimal, of course, but this is not indicative of a problem with the questions being asked. It is, rather, a problem with the established methods for answering them.

These are, admittedly, very loosely structured thoughts, and it is already evident to me that they contain major problems. Let this stand as a promise that I will return to the question of methodology in postmodern theory soon.

Words

The terror of the blank page is like the terror of ephemeral youth. Its purity, unmarred by words, is existence outside of time. The potential resides in eternity and every choice starts one on the road to death.

As I stood on the little observation platform with fireworks in front of me and a gathering storm to the side, I felt both terribly exposed and infinitely small. These irreconcilable feelings worked to annihilate each other while the container ships off the coast lit their lamps against the darkening sky and a wind stirred the long grass covering the sand dunes.

In the desire to capture experience through reflection, the end falls victim to the means, and the obligation to form memories results only in a vague sense of absence. One experiences most strongly when the boundary between subject and object fades. To live most fully, one must forgo the immediate consciousness of experience. Youth is used best when it is squandered. Does the same hold true for the blank page?

The Wandering Jew

No lengthy meditations tonight of the sort with which I try to reassure myself against that terrifying familiar doubt: a voice that whispers in my ear that my eyesight is too poor for gazing into the distance, my lungs too weak for the rarefied air of the heights. That voice will have plenty more time to luxuriate in its clever turns of phrase.

The life of a young son of the American bourgeoisie is an itinerant one. It is a life of endless endings. The interminable transitions from school to school and from school to that poorly rationalized farce called 'the real world' - which one accepts if one has been properly raised to hate discomfort and fear disgrace - stunt the relationships that the young person establishes with others as well as his/her ability to form, or even conceptualize those relationships in the first place. The awareness of transience underlies every new acquaintance, resulting in an aversion to the inevitable pain that accompanies separation from an object of love. The solution, of course, is not to love.

Modern life thus involves more separations than I can possibly envision in the lived experience of people in the locally-oriented, relatively static past of a few centuries ago (or in the lives of people outside the bourgeoisie).

I am about to move out of my summer accommodations and return to my parents' home. Another onerous transition; another regression into the childhood from which each modern young adult desperately seeks escape. The return home is now the failure of college education, whose principal goal is the transformation of children into adults. When I return home, I will find a fossilized version of me from four years ago still dwelling in my parents' minds. Their conceptualizations of me will guide their actions, and their actions will mold me back into that fossil. That will all end, of course, when in two months' time I will return to college (my god! for the last time!) and undergo yet another painful process of acculturation to new surroundings and to a new social role. I will become again more or less what I am now.

And then it will end, and I will say goodbye to all the people I care about, exchanging promises to see each other again - promises which tacitly admit the impossibility of carrying on any kind of organic, living relations after the separation. A few meetings to keep yet another fossil from disintegrating before we each give up the futile project and let the friendship dissolve into dust.

I arrived through random browsing at the blog of an eighteen-year-old girl whose precocious writing impressed and intrigued me. I briefly imagined an alternate life in which I had met her before I navigated away from the page, declaring to myself that I would never again encounter a trace of her existence. Technology gives us access to far too many of these impossibilities. Our digital flights end with frequent painful crashes against translucent panes on the far sides of which lie worlds that we will never inhabit, lives that we will never be able to live.

"The final reward of the dead - to die no more"
-Nietzsche, allegedly

Reflections on Nietzsche

I picked up Irvin Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept today, and have read about a third of it so far. It's a nice break from Adorno and various texts about Stalinist nationalism without being stupid. The book reminds me of Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden, although it is much more straightforward in narrative terms than the latter book, with its intertwinement of Dostoevsky in Baden and the Dostoevsky-obsessed narrator in Leningrad a hundred years later. I found the following passage striking:

And the way Nietzsche dared to say things! Imagine! To say that hope is the greatest evil! That God is dead! That truth is an error without which we cannot live! That the enemies of truth are not lies, but convictions! That the final reward of the dead is to die no more! That physicians have no right to deprive a man of his own death! Evil thoughts! He had debated Nietzsche on each. Yet it was a mock debate: deep in his heart, he knew Nietzsche was right.

And Nietzsche's freedom! What would it be like to live as he lived? No house, no obligations, no salaries to pay, no children to raise, no schedule, no role, no place in society. There was something alluring about such freedom. Why did Friedrich Nietzsche have so much of it and Josef Breuer so little? Nietzsche has simply seized his freedom. Why can't I? groaned Breuer. He lay in bed growing dizzy with such thoughts until the alarm rang at six. (Yalom, 75)

I won't bother locating it now, but there's a passage in Beyond Good and Evil about the terrible danger that faces the great man when he leaves behind the herd and the morality of the herd to create his own morality and to shape himself as he wills. No one will be there to aid him; no one will even know when some demon of conscience devours him in his isolation. That is Nietzsche's freedom. If that is something to be desired, then it is certainly not from the point of view of someone seeking escape from suffering. The best escape from suffering is death. Nietzsche is the consummate philosopher of death's opposite; that is, of life; that is, of suffering.

We have still not taken Nietzsche's insights to heart. God is not dead for the majority of the American population, even if he is crippled and emasculated, seeking refuge in the dingy corners that have not yet fallen under the scrutiny of science, its gaze "blank and pitiless as the sun." Where are the Christians who reject science instead of feebly trying to co-opt its rhetoric? Such people do exist, undoubtedly. But the religiosity of the great mass of Americans is a precarious tightrope act with only the flimsiest defenses helping them balance above the abyss.

As far as his refusal to credit the ego with the origin of thought, also in BGE, how long will it be before such an idea enters the popular discourse? Academic thought may have exploded the complacent idea of a coherent and fundamental subject decades ago, but how have those insights changed the lived experience of the vast majority of people? Fragmented though they may be, they would adamantly assert their coherence. We still acknowledge our surreptitious belief in the "Great Man" theory of history by crediting individuals with the ideas that appear in their works.

On a tangentially related note, I have always had difficulty understanding Nietzsche's condemnation of pity, despite Walter Kaufmann's qualifications, as anything except a criticism, to paraphrase Nietzsche crudely, of pity's tendency to multiply misfortune. However, Adorno and Horkheimer, as usual, offer a brilliant illumination in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Why aren't books like this required university reading? Each book of this magnitude is a new set of eyes, a towering new height from which to see ever more of the world [but a height equipped with telescopes to see new minutiae as well]!).

[Pity] confirms the rule of inhumanity by the exception it makes [. . .] The narcissistic deformations of pity, like the effusions of philanthropists and the moral complacency of the social welfare worker, are still an internalized endorsement of the difference between rich and poor. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 80-81)

It's a troubling idea - that by commiserating with the particular suffering person, we tacitly accept the normalcy of suffering. A seemingly heartless unearthing of the entwinement of reason and domination, an embittered condemnation of the entire order in which inequality and preventable suffering are facts of daily life, becomes the morally superior act.

To add yet another reference to this already excessive list, Benjamin apparently dreamt of a work consisting entirely of quotations. I think I can see the appeal of such a project: to be the unobtrusive facilitator of a conversation that overcomes all constraints of space and time to bring together the greatest minds who have expressed opinions on the subject in question. But is that all the appeal I see in this idea, or is there something more? It is a commentary that doesn't add a single word to the corpus of commentaries. There is something else there, but the insight isn't forthcoming. I guess, following Nietzsche, that its time hasn't come yet.

Introduction

Whenever I begin to write, I have to ask my own unvoiced question: why are you doing this? The world is, after all, already full of words - so many words! If anything, it would, perhaps, be better if more people refrained from expressing themselves. Perhaps there is not enough silence and unmarked paper. This isn't just because so much of what is written and said is stupid, or redundant, or pointless, but because whenever we are speaking or writing we are not listening or reading - and the world would benefit from more of each - and also because it takes a certain amount of self-importance to impose one's thoughts, feelings, and opinions upon one's audience - whether actual or only potential. What the world could certainly use is a lot more humility. It's not a respected virtue in our Western world of self-advocacy, competition, and self-love, but I think that the reorientation of perspective that humility necessarily brings - a reorientation to restraint, to self-doubt, to a certain kind of perspectivism - would promote a more humane society. All that said, I am writing - about the questionableness of writing, no less! But this is partly because I hope that what I write will be worthy of existence, and partly also because the preceding thoughts reveal something about my character: that is, a humbleness that vies for supremacy with a self-questioning but nonetheless haughty elitism, a tendency toward self-contradiction and paradox, and, of course, an inclination to digress.

The predecessors to this blog have existed both on paper and in this strange world of electrical signals. With each of them, my initial enthusiasm has degenerated as a re-assessment of the compiled writing has revealed a paucity of worthwhile thoughts and words. Nonetheless, the enthusiasm returns periodically, and I embark upon yet another of these adventures, always slightly wiser and therefore hopefully more interesting than I was at the time of the previous attempt.

All that said, I have still not satisfied myself as to the existence of this journal of sorts on the Internet. Why not write all this down in a notebook? The trouble is that clandestine writing is always permeated by the gloom of isolation. Faced with a paper journal I find myself enclosed in a dark room, which resounds with the multiplicity of my own voices. Why I find that disturbing, and why other people don't seem to, is a topic for future investigation. For now, I will only say that the possibility of sharing my private thoughts with other people is always appealing, but I want those people to be volunteers. Rather than imposing my words upon friends, I would prefer that unknown readers came of their own accord. But maybe that's rationalization. It's possible that I, as well as many writers of blogs, simply enjoy the opportunity to perform before an audience. In either case, with this post I put myself on stage.