It strikes me as something I've been motivated to do for a while, but have been overly apprehensive about doing, to write down the things I think about from day to day. I have lots of conversations in my head with various fictitious interlocutors, and I'm always keen to engage in discussion with my friends about both the most trivial aspects of my life and the things that mean the most to me. But I blanch at the thought that I might write something that people can read and evaluate with closer inspection. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that what I'm thinking about or the way I talk might be on display. I'm afraid of these things for a number of reasons: a paranoid preoccupation with coming off as sophomoric amongst my peers, the need to hold in my thoughts for fear that I'll look back on them and cringe or feel embarrassed, the fear that my writing is poor and the by now well-internalised belief that I lack clarity and structure in my thinking, I'm easily distracted and find it difficult to maintain a single train of thought because when I think about a topic I try to think about as many possibilities contained within it and my experience of it as possible. I'm also deeply concerned about the idea that I ought not to assume the role of an author. After all, what authority do I have to speak about things as though I'm the only one who experiences them, or more to the point, isn't it a selfish activity to think that people should care about my experience as being in some way unique? Not the question: Why should anyone care about what I have to say, because that's obviously for them to decide, but rather why should I think that anyone might have reason to care. I don't just think that in writing I run the risk of a kind of self absorption, the idea that people ought to have more concern for my life and thought more so than they ought to do so for anyone else who out of choice or lack of leisure time don't get around to writing, but I'm also concerned that this is a globally salient feature of authorship. (Though I don't think about it in these terms when somebody else is doing the writing, which might be telling about the reasons for why I've convinced myself to finally make the leap). Finally, I think my biggest concern with writing, and not just with writing but also with writing music and with art when these featured more seriously in my life, was that there's a sense in which all of these things share a peculiar duality: one one hand they are deeply personal and reflective; we(I) do them best when uninterrupted by anyone else, but at the same time this activity of writing on a blog, or of making music or art, is precisely with the intention of producing something for others to enjoy(?) or at least to evaluate, or maybe just to experience. And maybe this is what's still getting to me, these things only concern me in a personal capacity, and so the drive to share is in some sense a perverse one: 'look at me, look at what I've done. Admire me', perhaps I've got bad reasons for seeing it in this way, but in any case this is how I see it sometimes (or most times), and it's distinguished from conversational practice (i.e. discussion amongst friends) because I assume that a basic precondition of such interactions is that somebody cares, and so the felicity condition which makes it appropriate for me to share is set. All of this is of course just to say, if you're reading and this and thinking "what a sanctimonious prick", don't worry, I get it and to a large extent I agree with you. (And I'm not saying that in order to absolve myself either, I really do stand above myself here and say I'm such an asshole).
Nonetheless, please allow me to be selfish, and if you'd rather not read then I suggest you just don't and leave me on my way. This stuff is always stuck in my head and in spite of my taking the hit in terms of resigning myself to my fate of coming off like a dickhead, it'd be really useful for me to write this stuff down, and, occasionally to have people read it and present comment so that I stay in touch with reality. I encourage people to tell me I'm wrong, though I hope that what I've said so far implies that I probably already know that. In fact I should qualify, just tell me why I'm wrong, not that I'm wrong, that would be highly interesting. in any case, the point is that I believe that the practice of writing might provide a number of benefits, sometimes therapeutic, other times pragmatic, and most of all, hopefully, to somebody else other than myself. I hope that somebody reads something here and finds the experience worthwhile, though I'm under no impression that anyone should.
All of this is to provide a somewhat grandiose introduction to material that may well end up being patently banal. I don't live the kind of life where I have interesting things to report. I like coffee and I listen to lots of music, I want to write about these things in a quasi-review fashion (though it must be understood that I don't want to claim any authority upon which to assume my reviews ought to be considered as anything more than opinion). Sometimes I'll write about other things that are a little more abstract, or in any case have a little more to do with my internal world than they do with the outside (i.e., those things which have the distinctive character of my experience, and not of my experience of). I encourage you not to read these as they are undoubtedly likely to be highly embarrassing (see 'sanctimonious prick' from above). I would nonetheless be lying if I didn't say I'm writing any of this because I hoped that you would find it illuminating, if not for it's substantive content then at least as a study of what access to a public platform does to a neurotic self-absorbed philosophy student. I don't think that such information would be pragmatically useful for anyone other than so as to give me a wide-berth if you ever run in to me in real life! But hopefully that won't be the case.
I'll undoubtedly look back on this piece of writing tomorrow, or even in a couple of hours bearing in mind all of the considerations about why I ought not to write laid out in the first paragraph. I'll worry about what I've written here from the second that I hit the 'publish' button and I'll be convinced that those worries are well founded no matter what anyone else tries to tell me. I'll be annoyed at the number of times I've said 'I'! And I don't doubt that this will be a recurring set of feelings I have every time I write and publish here. Well, maybe it will go away after a while, and if so that'll be interesting to observe. In any case, even though I'll look back on the content of these writings with a reaction which I can only describe now as a melange of nervousness and disdain, I can nonetheless be reasonably confident that I will remain on board with the idea behind the project of writing, and with the conviction that it would be worse if I'd opted to say nothing at all.
P.S: I'd never publish anything if I proof read my own work, so sorry in advance for awkwardness of language, mistakes, lack of clarity etc.
Enda.
