On

Five years ago today I posted the first blog in this space, on John Banville's Shroud. I have no memory of the book and little more sense of the self who wrote it. For this I am grateful. Perhaps this is the one clear advantage of writing about books; or just writing.

In the indeterminate space prompted by this thought, I wonder how closely sleep and forgetting are necessary to the experience of reading and writing; that is, necessary and paradoxical. To live critically in the wake of such sleep, in order to understand it, in order to make worldly use of it, becomes a betrayal; a misunderstanding and a misuse. For this I am not grateful. Yet one can't live any other way.

Two books, one recent, one brand new, may offer some paradoxical help: Harald Weinrich's Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Fall of Sleep (translated by Charlotte Mandell).

Before this blog, I had for another five years written the Splinters blog at Spike. So that's ten years of blogging. The rounded figure suggests a corresponding need to move on to other places, in other forms, to redeem the misunderstandings and misuses. Literary blogging isn't a moving business however; it's forgetful and repetitious, just like its subject. So, on.