de Montaigne.
It’s been quite the 10+ year trip, personally speaking, this blog.
Montaigne’s Essais offered the best model of what I wanted to write beyond my poetry, fiction, and nonfictional prose. I set out in 2012, originally to record my thoughts and, indeed, if you go back to that first year, you’ll find many essays about ‘big’, general topics and themes, which arose for me, initially, in my high-school English teaching and my textbook editing and writing, and morphed into this blog as overviews and what Marshall McLuhan called “probes”.
(I am, incidentally, under no illusions that there are readers who’ve ‘dropped by’ and found what I’m doing to be as vain and frivolous as Montaigne said at the outset about his own essays.)
For me, this consciousness blog has brought much unexpected personal clarity, meaning, and purpose–all from the desire to make a record of my ephemeral thoughts and interests. I confess I did want to philosophize a bit along the way though maybe some didacticism did creep in here and there. (You do have to remember, context-wise, that I was a teacher and lecturer for 40 years!)
Overall, like Montaigne, who had also retired to write in his tower, I wanted to write in the sanctorum of my study once I had stopped public appearances at teacher conventions and doing textbooks around 2010. I wanted to write about what came to me on a given day, cobbling together the myriad blog entries that subsequently unfolded very naturally.
These, then, are my essais–my Montaigne-inspired musings, attempts, tries, learnings, experiences, memories, summations, ‘test flights’: these loosely-woven-together reflections on personal consciousness.
I have long pondered, like Montaigne, life in the moment, life en passant, life recollected, autobiographically, in effect. Like him, I have gone off in all directions recording trivia, family stuff, stories from the media, and completely imagined topics as in the large batches of poetry hither and yon.
And the result has been that I have found a surfeit, an unlimited amount of wide-ranging subject matter and much that I have come to accept about life and human nature in the pleasurable process.
I must conclude, though, that the this project has brought me much satisfaction in sharing and connecting with friends. And, if there was something I was restlessly questing to do when “Tothineownselfbetrue.ca” began, it has been more than adequately satisfied and today I am very much at peace.