I am 62 today. One year older than when my father died. This is also the last entry in my blog. I started it to test out the new media and to see whether I could devise a style that might work for a memoir. On the new media front I have been gratified by the readers and the responses although I should not pretend that it ever became more than Milton’s “fit though few” audience. On the style I was satisfied with some effects but narcissistic self-statisfaction is endemic to the genre and very difficult to outplay. On the down side it eat up far too much time – each entry took much longer to write than an equivalent piece of academic prose and I felt it diminishing my life in two ways. First once I had written down my thought on a subject, it became very difficult to broach that subject in speech – the written form mocked all attempts at spontaneity and elan. Second far far too much time was spent thinking of what might go into the blog – for the 50 or 60 entries there are two or three hundred that were abandoned.

So it is a relief to see it finished. But I like it well enough that it will continue an existence on the website that I am preparing. Willard van Orman Quine wrote that to be is to be a value of a variable, now to be is to be a url. A website will be produced in the next two months and I am considering both Facebook ( on the recommendation of my daughter and the Egyptian Revolution) and Twitter ( on the advice of Marcus Gilroy Ware).