Resources of the blogger

A blogger who ventures from home incurs a double risk, as our readers might not have considered, but of which they might be warned. To the universal hazard, of forgetting what one was about to say, there is added an abiding terror of losing the car keys - which is to say, of not finding one's way back, from an errant outing. Needless to say, the very best bloggers are the ones who've taken care to insulate themselves from this occupational risk, with a consistency of knowing what their subject will be. They achieve this either by not leaving home at all, or by not caring where they go. Those of us in the middle are constantly exposed to an anxiety, however, of which we probably are not the first to speak.

The urban reader may be familiar enough with the phenomenon, of awakening in a strange place. A piquancy of surprise is not untoward, so much as yet another phase of the dream state of the orig-inal adventure. But the constant blogger on urban lofts, say, or garden vistas, is never out of sorts where he is found, his resources unmislaid.

Our agrarians enjoy that other, simplifying assurance, of never leaving home. To the urban reader's insulation against surprise, they bring the solace of insularity, and manage that luxury with the serenest embrace of redundancy. A wit we know, who thrives by splitting the riparian difference of Manhattan, being on the East River 4 nights and the Hudson, 3, has essentially adopted this agrarian mode, as one might expect of an observer of rank. But in the doing of the common thing, the agrarian perceives himself the discovering if not avenging angel, and so might show us stacks of dishes shaped for that single, multi-bathed necessity ~ the drying, say, of a bar of soap.

Whereof it must be plain, the better blogs resemble most their readers. No one has to ask, on enter-ing their terrain, Am I going to understand? But there are blogs, just as there are persons, whose resort is comfort in no answer. You see them cited here from time to time, albeit through no fault of theirs. What makes theirs, the 'middle ground' alleged above?

To answer that, would take a naughty Wittgenstein, indeed. We can only suppose, that there comes a very broadly distributed time at last, where the experience of a question is savoured for its thirst, per se. The urbanist, afflicted by so many answers, is anxious to consume the brightest ones he can. The agrarian's complacency speaks for itself. But surprisingly few of us live in such places, after all, and would not go back. I don't know where my car keys are; what was I about to say?