I started writing this blog in late 2007—for all practical purposes, in 2008. And early on I had an idea that I thought immensely cool. Like many of my cool ideas I never got around to writing or posting it. (I have notes to myself, on little scraps of paper, for dozens of posts that I have yet to write—some for here and some for the Patio.) Then a few years later (I think it was late 2011 or so) D made me a present of a book which captured the very same idea and explained it a lot more lucidly than I ever did. So with your indulgence. I will start with a quote.
The twenty-first century is full of people who are full of themselves. A half-hour's trawl through the online ocean of blogs, tweets, tubes, spaces, faces, pages, and pods brings up thousands of individuals fascinated by their own personalities and shouting for attention. They go on about themselves; they diarize, and chat, and upload photographs of everything they do. Uninhibitedly extrovert, they also look inward as never before. Even as bloggers and networkers delve into their private experience, they communicate with their fellow humans in a shared festival of the self. …… The historian Theodore Zeldin has founded a site called "The Oxford Muse," which encourages people to put together brief self-portraits in words, describing their everyday lives and the things they have learned. They upload these for other people to read and respond to. For Zeldin, shared self-revelation is the best way to develop trust and cooperation around the planet, replacing national stereotypes with real people. … By describing what makes them different from anyone else, the contributors reveal what they share with everyone else: the experience of being human.
This idea—writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity—has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Périgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.*
To this elegant description I would add very little. The only main point would be that Montaigne's Essais—he is, by the way, the man who coined our modern word "essay" from the French essai which means "an attempt"—went through multiple editions over the years. During that time he changed his mind about any number of topics, the way you do. But he never deleted his old opinions, or pretended not to have held them in the past. Always he added new data, so that the text would ultimately read something like: "My opinion is this. But actually, on further consideration, I think my opinion may really be more like that." How different is this from inserting reference URL's that link to contrary opinions, or further developments? Of course for obvious technological reasons, Montaigne had to make all these edits on paper. But the principle is not so different: don't delete or forget what came before (and after all, as we know, "The Internet never forgets") but simply add new comments on top of the old ones. Surely this is the basic ethos behind blogging, and all the other forms of self-expression that the Internet affords us.
Today is Montaigne's 490th birthday. So pour yourself a glass of wine** and sit down with your friends for a good, long talk. And remember that when you are most yourself, in the deepest way, you are closest to everyone else in the world.
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* Sarah Bakewell, How to Live, or, A Life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (New York: Other Press, 2010), pp. 1-3.
** Not only was Montaigne a winegrower, but his estate still produces wine today. They even have a sales presence online. You can find them at: Montaigne - Tour Historique - Site officiel (chateau-montaigne.com).
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