I BLOG THEREFORE I AM

Why write? Why blog?

My Grade 10 English teacher encouraged us to keep a journal as a tool for increasing self awareness. "Journal to clarify your thinking. After you've completed journal entries, you have a mirror you can hold up to yourself." I had a crush on that teacher, which probably explains why I still remember those words.

Some twenty odd years later, having kept an irregular journal, I read a passage in Mark Kingwell's book Opening Gambits that recalled my teacher's words:

I know students are lying or confused when they say, as they so often do: I know what I think, I just can't express it. But I say to them: no. Until you can express it, you haven't really had the idea. You may have had an inkling, or an intimation, or a glimmer, or a sense of possibility; but not a thought. To really have an idea, you must give it expression in language, whether you write it down or not; and only by writing it down will you know the precise contours of the idea, as opposed to its vague outline. As Wittgenstein put it in the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus: " Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly."

After I read that, I resolved to write when I got home. But not in my journal--in the blog instead. Yes I could write in the journal, and I still do (the real private stuff). However, the blog dangles another carrot: potential readers. Because there could be readers, I force myself to think clearer, up the ante, clean up my act, organize better the old canoodle, craft better. And didn't Alberto Manguel write something about readers being the ones who bring a book to life in the creative act of reading? It makes the solitary act of writing somehow communal, because I'm already thinking of the reader. So, it's more...fun!

Therefore: I blog to clarify my thoughts and have more fun because of you my reader, who through the act of reading, has resurrected this blog, if just for this moment.

Thank you.