The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger
The process of becoming familiar with the characters in a novel cannot be directly compared with the complex sensations that flood the mind and body when relating to a living person. You open a book-perhaps it easily takes the mind along with its flow, and with some degree of confidence you are inevitably comfortable and intimate with its characters. Parallels include the awakening of a world of feeling and a rudimentary opening towards a course of judgement. Experience suggests that no two meetings are precisely alike. This is true for a number of reasons, including the circumstances of the contacts, and the time available for unravelling enigmas. In any case, people tend to find themselves compelled by an appetite for the related experiences of reaction and conjecture.
Most of us, of course, accept and expect a more or less continuous stream of such meetings in reality and in imaginative (re)enactment- including those presented by the omnipresent media where such dramas are routinely displayed for our absorption and our pleasurable, baffled or horrified consideration. These in turn engender mesmerizing speculations, and few can resist for long their fascinations, puzzles, their engrossing uncoverings, the spellbindng astonishments of a more or less steady diet of such quotidian perplexities. They impose themselves continuously in the course of a day. And yet so rarely we ask ourselves, in retrospect, what they were. Now and then a recurring observation or insight crystallizes on the periphery of currents of thought and worry- the only momentary shore and respite from the oncoming tide, the flux and undertow of curiously bewildering entanglements.
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Backstage
We are dismayed to immediately understand what incited the work of an artist or a writer. To be impelled to ponder what might have motivated their efforts is one of the main sources of our pleasure- and their pain.
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Magician Magnifique
Sarcasm, the greatest contemporary conjuror: one hat, infinite rabbits.
