Dialogue

I invite dialogue. If you think my blog contains brilliant and fascinating writing, the worst drivel ever perpetrated or anything in between, I'd like to know. If you have any thoughts concerning what I write I'd like to know them. And if you'd care to share any other thoughts about anything else please do. Some of my most interesting ideas, the ones I have most fun with and which make my life better have arisen in conversation/correspondence with other lovers of wisdom and seekers thereof.

If something I wrote suggests to you that we may have some intellectual or spiritual chemistry please communicate with me, and send me your own blog's URL. If you don�t have a blog yet you might want to start one. It's fun.

In London's Hyde Park it is common for people to stand on a soap box and start speaking, and visitors can stop to hear any speaker they want. Theoretically anyone could stand on a soap box and start speaking in any public place anywhere in one of the � very few � free-ish countries in the world, but, unlike in Hyde Park, such behavior would be considered unusual. The internet turns the entire world into Hyde Park. Finally one no longer needs to own a press to have free press, just a computer with an internet connection.

The problem is noise: there are so many speakers that it is difficult to find the ones offering meaningful messages among the enormous amount of nonsense, and often superficial nonsense at that, like a prominent member of the blogosphere who wrote a detailed account of his search for the perfect laptop bag.

Of course we are all free to write whatever we please in our own blogs; it's just that I regret the time wasted even in clicking on such a blog. But what do I know? There is a saying that "God is in the details"; perhaps if I were at a higher level of spiritual evolution I would be able to perceive profound significance in a story of a search for a laptop bag. Perhaps the laptop-bag-seeker would find what I write hollow. So we engage in mutual non-blog-reading.

If one cannot digress in one's blog where could one? Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), one of my favorite authors, who would have been a great blogger had there been a world wide web in the sixteenth century, was a master of digression: look at what he did in his essay "Upon some verses of Virgil" (in the original French, in the English translation by Charles Cotton (1630-1687)).