“Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
CNN, Andrew Sullivan:
For
years, Andrew Sullivan blogged at a prolific rate. ... "The truth is, I
had to stop primarily because it was killing me," Sullivan said Sunday
night at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan. "I used to joke that if
blogging does kill someone, I would be the first to find out."
“If Your Website’s Full of Assholes, It’s Your Fault” is a 2011 post from well-known blogger Anil Dash in which he writes about a specific kind of challenge faced by bloggers and online media providers. They are often forced to defend their enterprises “because so many of the most visible, prominent, and popular places on the web are full of unkindness and hateful..I went [home] with the air of someone who had discovered the world.
You must knock on doors until your knuckles bleed. Doors will slam in your face; I guarantee it. You must pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go back and knock again. It’s the only way to achieve your goals in life.
“It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning.”
Once the writer is in it, he is cozy and protected. He has everything he needs, as in a womb. He is secure enough to get in touch with all his most inner thoughts, demons and illusions, so when he gets out of it, he feels fresh and full of new ideas Studio for Media Dragons
One of the difficulties of leaving a relationship is not so much, at the end, leaving the person themselves — because, by that time, you’re ready to go; what’s difficult is leaving the dreams that you shared together. And you know that somehow — no matter who you meet in your life in the future, and no matter what species of happiness you would share with them — you will never, ever share those particular dreams again, with that particular tonality and coloration. And so there’s a lovely and powerful form of grief there that is the ultimate of giving away but making space for another form of reimagination.
“Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments — an inability to accept life as ongoing.”
Some of humanity’s most celebrated writers and artists have reaped, and extolled, the creative benefits of keeping a diary. For John Steinbeck, journaling was a tool of discipline and a hedge against self-doubt; for Virginia Woolf, a way to “loosen the ligaments” of creativity; for André Gide, a conduit to “spiritual evolution”; for Anaïs Nin, who remains history’s most dedicated diarist, the best way to “capture the living moments.”
Joining the canon of insightful meta-diarists isSarah Manguso with Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (public library) — a collection of fragmentary, piercing meditations on time, memory, the nature of the self, and the sometimes glorious, sometimes harrowing endeavor of filling each moment with maximum aliveness while simultaneously celebrating its presence and grieving its passage.
Looking back on the 800,000 words she produced over a quarter-century of journaling, Manguso produces an unusual meta-reflection that exudes the concise sagacity of Zen teachingsand the penetrating insight of Marshall McLuhan’s “probes.” She becomes, in fact, a kind of McLuhan of the self, probing not the collective conscience but the individual psyche, yet extracting widely resonant human truth and transmuting it into enormously expansive wisdom.