No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

A Note at the Beginning

October 2010

I’VE BEEN INSPIRED by José Saramago’s extraordinary blogs, which he posted when he was eighty-five and eighty-six years old. They were published this year in English as The Notebooks. I read them with amazement and delight.

I never wanted to blog before. I’ve never liked the word blog—I suppose it is meant to stand for bio-log or something like that, but it sounds like a sodden tree trunk in a bog, or maybe an obstruction in the nasal passage (Oh, she talks that way because she has such terrible blogs in her nose). I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be “interactive,” that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers. I am much too introverted to want to do that at all. I am happy with strangers only if I can write a story or a poem and hide from them behind it, letting it speak for me.

So though I have contributed a few bloglike objects to Book View Café, I never enjoyed them. After all, despite the new name, they were just opinion pieces or essays, and writing essays has always been tough work for me and only occasionally rewarding.

But seeing what Saramago did with the form was a revelation.

Oh! I get it! I see! Can I try too?

My trials/attempts/efforts (that’s what essays means) so far have very much less political and moral weight than Saramago’s and are more trivially personal. Maybe that will change as I practice the form, maybe not. Maybe I’ll soon find it isn’t for me after all, and stop. That’s to be seen. What I like at the moment is the sense of freedom. Saramago didn’t interact directly with his readers (except once). That freedom, also, I’m borrowing from him.