20190827.0430

If it is the case that I question why I continue to keep a journal, it should also be the case that I question why I continue to write in this webspace. Others I maintain, namely Elliott RWI and the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, serve clear functions for people other than me. The former serves as advertising for my freelance work and a repository for the students I still teach. The latter is a mouthpiece for a scholarly society I have the privilege of leading, one that offers publication venues for scholars who may not be the most traditional and presentation venues in at least one place. But this webspace serves as a place of random rumination and odd bits of verse. It lives up to the ravings in its name, though I am not sure the lucid prose in the same place appears as often as it perhaps should.
There is a certain amount of vanity that informs any public performance--and publishing writing, even so informally as in a blog like this, is a public performance. Doing so demands that the one doing it have some belief that he or she has something to contribute, something others need or want to see, and that necessarily has a certain amount of arrogance about it. Who am I, after all, to decide that you need to read a thing, or that you want to do so? Yet I make that decision with each keystroke, each letter put into pixels and pushed out into the world where, presumably, somebody reads it--few as such people are, from the reports of readership available to me.
Yet vanity is a bad thing, or it is often called so. In any other situation, I would not do well to indulge the presumption that I do in writing and posting. I would be rightly rebuked for telling another person, mouth to ear, that he or she wants something or needs it in most cases--Ms. 8, as she is now, offers most of the exceptions. Why it should be different for writing is not entirely clear; there is the fact that readers seek to read, admittedly, that they are generally not forced to click the link or turn the page, but choose to do so. But that is not the sum of it, I am certain, though I am not certain what the remainder is.
Even more than most of the writing I do, this blog is a vanity project. It does not bring in money; it does not advertise my efforts except insofar as it links to them; it does not allow others to promote their own work. And while I will treat many topics in it that might be called objectionable, there are decided limits as to what I post here, even more than to what I log into the pages of my personal journal. It is not an open and authentic representation of who and what I am, not really. So its continued justification for existence is uncertain.
I have considered setting this aside before. I am not going to leave it off quite yet. But I do not know how much longer I will keep it going. Then again, that is always true...