Justified Ends

I first began this blog in 2004, which was the first year of the Programme. The many of you who have visited here know which programme that is. It began as a logical extension of my long life in the infosphere, perhaps what I would call a blogobubble, an evanescent excursion via weblog. It is not ending. In fact, despite heavy pressure, the bubble has not deflated; rather it has taken on the qualities of a resilient and refractive sphere of its own.

It is not large, nor popular. It is a heavy day when more than 100 people drop by. Few leave comments, and some say that blogs should not be written in such formal (and occasionally, opaque) style.

But it has been through this blog (and various satellite blogs) that I have come to know some of you a lot better. I now know that I have unknown friends and known friends in California, Finland, Australia, Virginia, Poland, Denmark, and many such in the UK. I have viewed at least 35,000 blogs; and I have come across examples of writing that I can only think of with mordant admiration, so beautiful they are. Some of you have written prose that is so understandable, so clear and personal and brave and powerful, that I weep with frustration at my own lack of ability.

And that frustration is genuine. Some of you have kindly pointed out that I have no complete lack of talent, and that in some ways I am indeed rather good. It seems to me that the better I am, the more acutely I am able to appreciate how much more talent others have. What these older eyes see is that the talent in your words is someday going to be refined further by blood and fire, grief and joy, and raised to even higher levels.

But will the blogosphere be the only space in which our paths will cross again? I admit that this question nags at me. It is a variant of the infamous 'empty nest' syndrome, wherein one feels morbidly dissatisfied with life when the focus of one's attention and time has left the vicinity. I know it will not last, but I would hate to lose the friendships and fellow-sufferings that the First and I have experienced together.

Do keep in touch. May our blogobubbles occasionally share an interface, a rare reminiscence, a distant reflection. And as Eliot said:

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

And now off to finish touching up the testimonials.