In the heyday of the blogosphere, I never had the slightest interest in blogs. I would stumble upon them during web searches now and then like everyone else online. But few inspired me to return and none to read them regularly.
I saw blogs as hasty and amateurish imitations of professional publications. Why read some nobody’s unedited, ungrammatical, and probably inaccurate account of an event when a more concise article was available in the Globe and Mail or The New York Times? Why peruse the poorly formatted photojournal of some random camera geek, when there were beautifully-designed, professional photobooks to be had?
I’m sure there were tons of fascinating sites out there that I missed out on due to my prejudices, but the fact remains that the blog just wasn’t a medium that called to me. It certainly never occurred to me to write one, and I turned my creative energies instead to writing novels and to Japanese translation.
The first time that blogging finally made sense to me was in 2018 when I read Michele de Montaigne’s Essays. It is from this tome that we get the essay; Montaigne is credited with inventing the essay as a form of literature.
In 16th century France, essay or “essayer” meant something like “to try out” or “attempt.” Montaigne’s writings are essays, rather than treatises, in the sense that they do not seek final conclusions. They simply attempt to capture and record his thoughts as accurately and truthfully as possible.
Open expression was a dangerous exercise in those days, under the censorious regime of the Catholic Church. Lucky for Montaigne, he was a devout, gregarious, and affable man. His ideas occasionally landed him in uncomfortable situations, including a brief trip to the Bastille, but he was so widely liked that he managed to scrape by without punishment.
The Essays contains 107 chapters, each composed of a series of linked impressions, memories, or arguments on some theme. It is riddled with contradiction and apparent hypocrisy. In one essay, Montaigne seems to be a dedicated Stoic, espousing the willful subjugation of desire, in another an Epicurean, advocating hedonism. Then he’s a radical skeptic, then he toys with atheism, then he’s an orthodox Catholic. If The Essays is read cover to cover, Montaigne comes across as the flip-flopper par excellence.
But capturing this inconsistency is central to what his project is all about. Since we all change our mind frequently, any accurate depiction of a person’s thought process over the course of a lifetime will necessarily include many clashing propositions.
I think Montaigne’s work has lasting appeal because it takes human psychology seriously. Our minds inevitably shift over the decades as we gather new experiences and the world around us changes. Amid this flux of both subjectivity and objectivity, lifelong convictions are the exception rather than the rule, and any mode of writing or approach to truth-seeking that assumes otherwise is either mistaken or disingenuous.
Writers who present a single viewpoint consistently are often engaged in a performance, unwilling to change their stance for fear of being accused of switching teams — either that, or they are pandering to their readership. Some even convince themselves that they believe what they falsely preach, under the sway of positive reinforcement and praise from their followers.
Montaigne eschews all such ideological theatre. He tells you what he thinks that day. Then he does it again the next day. And the next. And gradually his views shift. Often he seems to be carrying out a simulation. Montaigne asks again and again, if X were true, then what might I think about Y? After that, he works it out on the page, and leaves the result for posterity.
One essay is on fear, another on cannibalism. One is on conscience, another on deformed babies. There is no topic that Montaigne shies away from in his efforts to find out what opinions he might arrive at.
As I was reading the essays, I thought, wow, this is just like blogging! I was feeling impressed with myself for this original insight until I checked online and discovered that essays and blogs written long ago — indeed, back in the days of the blogosphere — had already drawn this very connection.
Still, my discovery had already made its impact on me; I had finally grokked the impulse behind blogging: the desire to capture and share thought with the world in real time. Of course, nowadays, with the proliferation of content marketing and attention-seeking self-promotion, most actual bloggers have more enterprising motives. But it is this driving force — call it the pure ideal — of blogging that I find compelling.
Creating a perfect record of your thought stream is, of course, a hopeless task. The very act of putting thought into words is a distortion. Then there is inevitably going to be a certain degree of self-censorship; total honesty runs the risk of descending into psychotic rambling. Whatever distorted and censored version of thought makes it the page or screen will then be subjected to editing (hopefully!). The order of phrases will be rearranged, thesauruses will be procured to replace limp words, new paragraph breaks will be added, expressions will be entirely reworked…
What survives these layers of alteration will bear little resemblance to unadulterated thought. But if great care is taken to preserve the original thrust, it should serve as a worthy simulacra of thought, or, in Buddhist language, like a finger pointing to the moon. Until we perfect thought-to-text technology, that is probably the best we can hope for.
Blogging in the 2020s, with everyone and their grandma wielding DSLR cameras, is all but inseparable from photography. How visual images fit in with what I’ve written here is difficult to say. Montaigne lived hundreds of years before the advent of photography. Perhaps that is a topic for another essay…
To conclude this one, I’m grateful to Montaigne for teaching me the value of the blog. I doubt that this blog will bear much resemblance to The Essays. It will contain many photos and straightforward book reviews. It will mix highfalutin pontification with kitsch and sheer silliness as it sees fit. But in the spirit of Montaigne, I hope it will be a sincere reflection of who I am in the mirror of language.
by Eli K.P. William.
I am the author of three dystopian sci-fi novels: Cash Crash Jubilee, The Naked World, and A Diamond Dream. I also translate Japanese literature, including the bestselling novel A Man, by Keiichiro Hirano.
More about me here.
My Twitter: @Dice_Carver
