My unwritten blogs

In February, I said here that I hoped to be back to normal within two weeks. In March, the medical estimate was closer to six months. The paucity of posts confirms who was right. And while returning to work and the unrelenting fatigue associated with a serious brain injury are the obvious causes, there is another.

It's not like there haven't been provocations to post. From Nigel Beale's continued defence of literary biography, to Jeremy Adler's review-essay on Novalis and, most recently, the middlebrow fear of literature at PEN World Voices in New York, the blogging throb was felt. And, while each of these might have maintained the pleasant momentum of blogging, I held back. Writing these unwritten blogs would, I sensed, dissipate the pressure of the essential question pulsing around my damaged head.

"But surely" says Nigel, resisting alternative readings of Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve, "the 'essence' which makes Shakespeare Shakespeare, Picasso Picasso etc., although obviously important, is something beyond description, or comprehension." Well, yes. But not quite. We comprehend it every time we watch a Shakespeare play, look at painting by Picasso or read novels like Proust's. Everyone can comprehend the essence, just as everyone can frown over the painter's behaviour or gossip about the writer's sexuality. Yet comprehension is also the intoxication of reading. It ends as soon as the encounter is over. From then on, we begin to read backwards, towards the mirage of origin. No wonder biography sells: after all, the moi profond won't fill The Guardian's book pages.

Yet, if comprehension flits by, what can we do other than bury our reveries inside the platitudes of public discourse? This might be the question maintained in the blogs I will not write.