songs of experience

I don’ t know why I’d never read her before, but this week I checked Joan Didion’s Sloughing Toward Bethlehem out of the library. Her writing reminds me of Anne Morrow Lindberg’s but a lot hipper. As I read around in the section called personals I came across a passage which could serve as a definition for what is the purpose of a blog?

It is a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing. (”You’re the least important person in the roomand don’t forget it,” Jessica Mitford’s governess would hiss in her ear on the advent of any social occasion; I copied that into my notebook because it is only recently that I have been able to enter a room without hearing some such phrase in my inner ear.) Only the very young and the very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self, interrupt with memories of beach picnics and favorite Liberty lawn dresses and the rainbow trout in a creek near Colorado Springs. The rest of us are expected, rightly, to affect absorption in other people’s favorite dresses, other people’s trout.
And so we do. But our notebooks [or our blogs!] give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensees; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.

That is the definition of a blog entry:
” … bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscrimintate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”