I Hate Bloggers

I have always been dismissive of bloggers. Bloggers are people who set forth banal mumblings as if their chatter were original insight rivaling Nietzsche or Twain, or even Stewart (Jon) or Maddow (Rachel). Blogging is self-indulgence, and I hate self-indulgence.

Bloggers of the world—I apologize.

The truth is, some of my best friends are bloggers. And there are quite a few people I know who don’t blog, but I wish they did. Lately, I’ve started to think that maybe blogging isn’t just about narcissism after all: maybe blogging emanates in the audacious possibility (and audacity is always easy to ridicule) that what one individual thinks might actually matter. With a naive certainty I find not just comforting but downright inspiring these days, bloggers don’t seem to worry about whether a tree falling in the forest makes a sound if no one is around to hear it: it does. So philosophers be damned—let’s make some noise!

And there’s another thing. All this time I’ve been seeing only vanity in bloggers, the vast majority of whom I suspect write for an audience comprised of themselves and a teeming crowd of imaginary fans. But maybe what motivates the blogger is not so much a delusion of fame as it is a modest hope for a connection, for a meeting of minds in the great stream of consciousness. In this spirit—and with all due respect to the anachronism police—I’m making Walt Whitman the patron saint of my blog. Whitman’s Noiseless Patient Spider has been one of my favorite poems ever since I first encountered it, and I can’t think of a more eloquent or honest way to describe my own hopes and desires in launching this blog.


A Noiseless Patient Spider (1868)
By Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor told,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.