*Preface to the Print Edition (Posts 1–40)*

30 June 2023

I am in the process of preparing for publication a print edition of my first forty posts that should become available on Amazon over the next few weeks under the title My Beggar’s Buddhism. [1 August: It is now available!] The texts will look better on paper and lend themselves more readily to the kind of intellectual exercise—pen and cappuccino at hand—that accords best with my reading philosophy. As a teaser, here is the preface:

My decision to start a blog in 2023 not only came a good quarter-century too late to be hip (see Post #35 on Late Adopting), it also brought some awkwardness of a less obvious sort.

It’s not the technology that has been making me uncomfortable. I don’t write on wax tablets, with a quill or a fountain pen, or even on a mechanical typewriter. No, I’ve been using word-processors since I was a teenager, back in the last days before cell phones and the internet, and I’ve always been very happy with the enhanced possibilities of writing that way (and dispensing with the scissors and the glue which I still used for my earliest serious writing project, something terribly earnest on capital punishment).

Nor is it the format that bothers me, at least as I have adopted it to my purposes. I gather that my posts do not pass for mainstream material these days, but seeing them through a Montaignian lens myself, I like my version of the genre very much, as being both classical and personally congenial. And the worldwide map on which I can follow how my texts are slowly making their way across the globe, one faithful reader at a time, is nothing if not exciting—just one of the many ways in which our technology-driven world really is quite amazing, even before I have said anything about the speed of light and the shadows there must be, as Goethe famously said, wherever the sun shines abundantly.

No, my discomfort has been coming from a different direction altogether—the reading side—and it has something to do with what I keep telling my students on the strength of decades of experience with the printed page, namely that reading on a screen (a phone-sized one especially) is a completely different experience, and not very conducive to the atmosphere of detailed scrutiny and slow pondering that to me is inseparable from serious reading. Yet, careful as I have been to carve out a small writer’s and reader’s niche, not another noisy and fast-paced entertainment hub, my texts have, so far, been available only in a format that by my own articles of faith makes proper reading all-but impossible. An awkward position to find oneself in, to say the least.

I understand how tedious this refrain must sound to those who do not share my faith in old-fashioned print (one’s own copy always, pen and highlighter in hand, not the spotless library volume marked only by decades of dust). Such sermons no sooner enter into one ear than they exit from the other, and I am under no illusions about making converts to my cause except perhaps in my classrooms, under a measure of duress that I regret but that I hope will prove justified by the students admission, ideally, that it really did benefit them in some unexpected way by the end of the term.

I am not surprised to see the opening of the Book of John popping up repeatedly in my writing, not as an affectation, I think, but because it speaks so deeply to my need for a message of hope. I am put in mind also of Golo Mann’s beautiful tribute to Schiller as a historian (which I mention briefly in Post #20): “He knew that to tell a story even about something that really did happen will always require a measure of poetic creativity, because it cannot possibly be grasped as it occurred in its formless infinity. Whoever wishes to narrate anything must do so beautifully, putting his own self forward while shaping words into rhythms in order to banish the dragon of chaos for a while.”

Suffice it, then, to invoke that sense of grace which the Christians attribute to God; I am not comfortable speaking of the divine, but that nothing is possible in this life without grace, I feel every day of my life.