Thoughts on this Blog

I've always hated it when anybody claims to be very busy. It seems self-important and pompous. If you're busy, you don't have to tell everybody how busy you are. After all, we all have the same amount of time in the day, and we're all doing something with it.

So I won't say I've been very busy recently. I have, however, been preoccupied with other things than this blog for the last month or so.

Today was actually the first day I had time to contemplate writing a proper blog post. The longer I contemplated, however, the harder I found it to think of something adequate to write.

There's no shortage of subjects, really. Life is a dizzying kaleidoscope. It would be easy enough to pick a subject at near-random and set my keyboard clacking.

But I was trying to think of a subject that's important to me, and that might be important to other people.

Every time one occurred to me, I thought of a previous blog post (or many blog posts) that I'd written on that topic previously. Everybody has themes that exercise them. If you're a painter, or a poet, or a musician, you can revisit those themes endlessly, since artistic expression has the power to make the old (or the timeless) ever-new. But it's not really the same with the essayist (and a blogger is essentially an essayist). The essayist risks becoming a bore.

One remedy to this might be to write more feature-style, informational articles. Like the articles I wrote for my short-lived Traditions Traditions Traditions! blog. This requires time for research, though.

I'm actually quite proud of this blog. It's been going since 2011, which I think makes it something of an institution, and I'm all in favour of institutions. More than that, it's proof that I have, in some small way (and I'm under no illusions as regards to its smallness), fought the good fight and raised my banner on behalf of precious things.

In some ways, I think I've been ahead of the curve. Organized religion was very much on the defensive when I started blogging. Today, the New Atheism is a fading memory, and we have a whole wave of high-profile conversions to Christianity. One assumes that something similar is happening with ordinary people, except you don't hear about it. Meanwhile, the debate between atheists, agnostics and believers has become much more respectful and friendly than it was in the days of New Atheist sloganeering.

(Even on a purely personal and anecdotal level, I've seen the congregations in the UCD church becoming more reverential and traditional over the last few years. A mostly-student congregation that now regularly features several young women in mantillas, and usually one or two babies, is quite remarkable.)

Similarly, the pitiful thing that called itself "conservatism" back in 2011 (the era of Mitt Romney and David Cameron) has almost been laughed out of existence. In 2012, I wrote this trio of blog posts explaining why I was a traditionalist conservative. I think it's fair to say that conservatism today is much closer to my own vision than the sort of conservatism that was ascendant fifteen years ago. Indeed, you could even say society itself has moved much closer to my vision. Tradition and character are back, baby!

(Ireland remains an outlier. But then, we are always several decades behind.)

On the debit side, my campaigns for the revival of traditional poetry have been completely fruitless. I can't get anyone to care about poetry-- proper poetry. People listen respectfully, agree, and then go on ignoring it. Conservatives are every bit as indifferent as liberals. I see no imminent prospect of this changing.

Added to that, this blog has shown no sign of growing its audience. I'm grateful to the few people who comment, but I have no evidence of new regular readers. I've become aware that blogs themselves are going out of fashion. Which to me is just another reason to keep soldiering on. My archive is now quite extensive, but I rarely even get new comments on the old posts. I'd always harboured the fond hope that more people might discover this bIog through coming across this or that article that interested them (there are well over two thousand), but it doesn't seem to have happened. I find this discouraging.

I was delighted, however, that this blog received a lovely tribute on the excellent Some Definite Service blog, which I venture to call a sister blog to this one.

The blog will continue, one way or another. I'll just have to mull over what direction it should take. I am grateful for everybody who reads it.