I haven’t been blogging in here for a long time. Part of the reason is I’ve been doing so on a Spanish language weblog I won’t link to in order to better protect my anonimity. The cause, however, was mostly laziness and apathy. Eventually one gets tired of making noises at the void…
The situation reminds me of a great work by Dostoyevsky, perhaps his greatest. I refer to Notes from Underground, a complex and difficult to categorize work. I remind myself of its narrator, expostulating on dealing with the impossible:
I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.
“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on.”
Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.
And really, doesn’t it seem a bit quixotic to insist on drafting and editing and “publishing” my essays–what a grand yet false sense of moment, the verb to publish–for them to end, like so many other futile endeavours, lost in the æther, to profit or harm no-one? This must be the eventual obsession of all frustrated writers, and most writers are frustrated: all nice sentiment to the contrary, a single mind changed does not necessarily justify an infinite amount of effort. There comes the time when one must make one’s bow to fate–not so?–and admit that there are better things to do with one’s time.
Yet, there really aren’t better things to do with mine. Time passes, as I chat and read and think, and, when I can compell my stubborn self, study, and little suggests any of that is worth the effort, either. At least, my writing does yield a product of sorts, even if it’s abstract and no-one can grip it in the hand. Reading and chatting obtain far less, and as for studying… the least said on this, the better.
So time has come to once again assail the stone wall. This time, without the naïve pretention of storming heaven, but, rather, modestly attempting to leave some dents on fate, and on boredom. Let it be so!
