I haven’t been answering too many comments in this thread because i felt they were not necessarily mine to address. In this case, I’m pretty sure I can’t speak for Anonymous in his choice of words. If it had been me, I probably would’ve said “practicing awareness” instead. That may or may not be approximately what he meant.

Thanks for reading. I’ve been enjoying your tree blog, too.

What you’re both saying to me, in different ways, is that a writer has to find his own way, and there will be as many different ways as there are writers.

Natalie asked, “What if every writer, artist, composer, architect, philosopher, poet . . . had all decided to destroy their work after a short time? . . . We wouldn’t know any of it.”

This is true, but it is also completely possible that they did destroy their work, perhaps huge amounts of it, that we will never know, and never know about, and the only work that survives them is the work that they wanted to have survive.

This, itself, is an immense question in the arena of blogging.

I like to think that my writing has improved as the years pass, and old pieces serve as benchmarks.

Thoreau used his journals as prose quarries, and someday I may do the same with my archives.

The notion of a poet . . . destroying what he has written . . . is conceivable. . . . [T]hey have done so precisely under pressure of the other’s intrusion. It is because the claims of the other’s presence reach so deeply into the final precincts of aloneness that a creator may, under circumstances of extremity, seek to guard for himself or for willed oblivion what are, ineluctably, acts of communication and trials of encounter.

A quote from George Steiner’s Real Presences, a book Dave recommended somewhere and one that I’m nursing down this month. (Steiner’s point isn’t evident from the quote alone; he is meeting anticipated objections to his assertion that art presupposes “the other.”)

Readers do get into my mind in unhealthy ways, and it is in that sense of maintaining privacy that I periodically walk away from blogging. (I don’t pretend to speak for Anon., of course.)

Good points about HDT’s journals, etc. As for Emily Dickinson, my feeling is that although Anon stands out among bloggers, he may not be all that atypical of people in general in the way he tries to balance an impulse toward self-expression with a strong desire to maintain privacy. Maybe this interview will inspire other introverts to take up blogging.

Nancy – There’s no doubt Anon has a lock on the mystique thing. I’m not sure that enters much into his thinking, though. I’m with you on the grumpiness.

I’m thinking of Annie Dillard’s author’s note to her collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk, where she remarks that these short works aren’t occasional pieces: they’re her real work. For whatever reason, she felt necessary to assert the validity of her short prose, knowing that some folks would see her book-length projects as being more “real” or valid.

For me, blogging is my “real work,” or at least an important, valid part of that work. It’s not an exercise, and it’s decidedly not impermanent. But all that being said, I can see & understand where “Anon” is coming from: his simply isn’t a practice that I fully share.