There's another reason to blog.

It's really more important to me than the others I mentioned in my initial post. Blogging at its best is a form of essay-writing, and that is one of the hardest forms of writing to do well. Writing a mediocre or uninteresting essay is easy; just look at the op-ed page of any newspaper. But writing an essay that draws the reader in, convinces her of the importance of the topic, and leaves the reader thinking about the essay afterward, well that's a lot harder. So I'm going to think of my blogging as practice in writing essays. Maybe I'll get good at it.

When I think of great essayists I think most often of people who are considered popularizers in some sense or other. Loren Eiseley, for instance, who introduced at least two generations of readers to the notions of Deep Time and the fossil record. He brought romance to the manual labor of digging, by telling us of what we might find, and how we might feel about it. And there was Stephen J. Gould, more acerbic than romantic, more interested in baseball than camping out, I suspect, but still trying to give us a feeling of wonder at the way the world is constructed. One of the key attributes of great essay writing, though, is brevity, which eliminates a lot of otherwise-admirable writers who excel at longer distance but fail in the sprint. I'm thinking here of Carl Sagan, and George Dyson as examples.

Of course, there's one writer that everyone thinks of as the essayist's essayist, because he quite literally wrote the book on the subject, and that's E. B. White. Wrote some good kid's books too.

The program, then, is to try to emulate White, and Gould, and Eiseley, and see what comes out. There is a potential downside, of course, that the kind of more formal language I'm talking about using won't be appealing to 21st Century blog-readers, and so no one will read my blog more than once. But that's where the ego comes in ... if I didn't have it, I wouldn't be up here dancing.