On blogging

I’ve been blogging seriously for over five years now, so I step back to take stock of what I’ve been up to and what I’ve actually achieved. Nearly seven hundred posts, enough words written for several novels. Posts about individual books, novels, plays and poems. Posts on more general topics, to do with aspects of literature and teaching. Posts about my travels, about the Great War, and lots more besides.

I’ve enjoyed writing them, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. And now I’ve got myself into a sort of routine, where I find I’m thinking more critically about a book as I read it, and often jotting down short notes about what I’ll write about. Sometimes an idea for a more general piece will pop into my mind as I read, or when I’m awake in the night, and I’ll start jotting down my thoughts; eventually it will be time to write it up, if there’s enough to say. So there’s a kind of mental discipline here, I feel: I read more carefully and critically, and make myself try and give coherent shape and form to my ideas. There is also the thought of all that complex electrical activity in my brain not going entirely to waste…

I write each piece using my notes, revise it carefully, and look for a picture of the book’s cover to illustrate it, if the post is about a particular book.

I have getting on for 300 followers, either via facebook or direct subscribers. Not that many, I think, but then I realise my subject-matter and my approach is a fairly serious one. I get upwards of a couple of thousand visitors a year; not that many really. Some posts get lots of readers, some only a couple, some none at all, I fear. I’m astonished at the ones visitors flock to – Theodore Kroger’s The Forgotten Village seems to head the list at the moment, closely followed by Derek Guiton’s A Man That Looks on Glass. The first is an obscure memoir set in revolutionary Russia, the second is part of a dialogue about the future direction of the Religious Society of Friends. Amazing what search engines will do…

I haven’t had that many comments on what I’ve written, and sometimes this saddens me; I wonder if it’s because I come across as too knowledgeable, or my reading and thoughts are too obscure, or the way I express my opinions tends to preclude comment or discussion. I’ve long wanted to engage in dialogue with more of my readers; I’m grateful for the comments that do develop into an exchange, and I like it when people disagree with me, take issue and argue – I think my former students would back me up here… Anyway, to those of you who do comment, whether to agree, disagree, or offer a different perspective on what I’ve said – thank you.

David Boulton: Through A Glass Darkly

I explained that I wasn’t about to censor what I wrote about, when I posted this review of Derek Guiton‘s A Man That Looks on Glass a couple of years ago; despite its rather obscure intention – or perhaps because of it – it has been one of my most viewed posts, presumably by Quakers reading up on the debate. And so, out of a sense of fairness, I read this short riposte, by the man at whom Guiton’s book was mainly directed.

Boulton is a non-theist Quaker, one who does not believe in the real existence of a being that is God. On the other side are those for whom such a being has an actual existence. Boulton is concerned to refute some of Guiton’s charges and accusations and make clear his desire for inclusivity of belief within the Society of Friends. And for me, the most salient point he made in the entire book was that Quakers have avoided theological conversations for the last 30 years…

I found myself wondering, what about those of us in the middle, who are not able to nail our colours to either mast, those of us seeking after truth (or Truth) which we will perhaps never attain? ‘Agnostic’ is a nice easy label but doesn’t really do justice to the searching, and avoiding theological conversations is unhelpful, just as avoiding tricky issues generally gets one nowhere…

Increasingly I find myself accepting Feuerbach‘s notion that we make god in our own image – if we make one at all, because that is all we can do as humans. And if I make the god I (sometimes) believe in in my own image then I have a god that encompasses my sense of wonder and awe at the vastness and beauty of the cosmos, and a god that symbolises knowledge and understanding of it, which I regard as the highest of our human goals and achievements.

To me. all gods and religions have been and are a necessary and an understandable response by many (not all) humans to our knowledge of our own mortality and ultimate annihilation, which many of us find hard to understand and accept, an obliteration after what has been the marvellous experience of existence for our brief allotted span of time. And no, I can’t imagine an afterlife that I can recognise or understand, in which I might have an existence, which from my current perspective is what I’d desire…

As I grow older, I find myself wrestling rather more with such questions. Both Guiton’s and Boulton’s writings have stretched my thinking, for which I am grateful; neither has brought me nearer to an answer, which was perhaps to be expected, and so the search goes on. And I’m enjoying it, which is just as well, really…

Derek Guiton: A Man That Looks on Glass

I hesitated before writing about this book, because it’s a very personal choice, and a rather arcane one, too, but I don’t like to censor what I write about what I read.

It’s a theological work, aimed at a very small minority – Quakers who are interested in the possible future of the Religious Society of Friends; it’s a very demanding and also a very thought-provoking book, that clearly links in to my own life and spiritual journey. The author explores theist and non-theist approaches to religion – if you can see how that might be possible – and looks at the difference between the immanent and the transcendent, as he considers what God is, the nature of God, and just how much it’s possible for us to understand about God, if there is one. (My italics).

To me increasingly it seems that in order to have some comprehension of, and some way to approach the idea of God, we necessarily make God in our image, and yet obviously, if there is a God, then that anthropomorphic deity is not God, for God must be much more. In other words, we are very much hemmed in by the limitations of the human mind, and what we can see. And although science is doing its best to dispel God and the spiritual, there are evidently things science will never be able to tell us: what was there before the Big Bang? What will there be after the death of the universe? What is there outside our universe?

And, from his evidently very wide and scholarly reading, Guiton shows us that scientists are actually rather less dogmatic about many of these questions than popular beliefs would suggest… His book is well-written (although headache-inducing in some places); he explains and illustrates his arguments well, and he is clearly arguing from a very specific viewpoint within a small religious society, and one with which I have a great deal of sympathy.

Quakers haven’t really done theology very much, apart from an astonishing treatise by Robert Barclay at the end of the seventeenth century, the masterly An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, in which he argues and would prove that Quakers have gone back right to the basics of early Christianity. That is a book to which I frequently return, as I shall to Guiton’s.