Hey man, slow down

I've been gone for a few weeks and there are 212 unread items on my Google Reader. I click "Show All Items" and start to flip through, but the erratic ricochet of subject matter from post to post makes me confused and a little anxious. So I decide to tackle my various blogs one by one, kill them off systematically.

The first is The Sartorialist, which, because it is mostly a picture blog, accounts for nearly a third of my unread entries. I skim a few, then click "Mark All As Read." Aaron has a handful of typically intelligent but unfortunately dense entries on a variety of topics; I open up my TPL account and place a hold on The Elements of Typographic Style, and promise myself I'll come back and chew through his post on modernity. The Elegant Variation is my backdoor pass into the literary world, and here I open up new tabs on Margaret Atwood on Twitter, Paul Krugman on health care, James Wood in the New Yorker, and - this especially fills me with delight - Daniel Mendelsohn on Avatar. There is also an entry that catches my eye: an author on her experience of incorporating poetry into her daily routine. She, Siobahn Phillips,

would use some of the many sites that present daily or nearly-daily verse: “Today’s Poem” at the Academy of American Poets, the “Featured Poem” at Poetry magazine, the morning selection at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, the “new poems” column at thepage.name—plus a site that offers a Shakespeare sonnet each day.

Tabs appear for Poets.org, Poetry Magazine and Poetry Daily, along with bookmarks in my browser toolbar. A brief glance at these websites reminds me of Michael Silverblatt, a radio critic I discovered from TEV on a similar linkhunt some months ago; I spent a few enraptured hours listening to his radio interviews with Chang-Rae Lee and Sharon Olds, the latter of whose poetry struck a particular chord with me and led me to seek out more of her work (I can now recite her poem "One Week Later" from memory). I haven't been back to Michael Silverblatt since.

But look at all the riches here still to be mined: there's new posts from the ever-impish Nico Muhly, whom I once found deliriously unconstrained but whose words now seem to bracket his meaning like the bars of a cage; a few doses of academia from Dial M; grievances with Google in Evan Osmos's Letter From China (are blog titles italicized or put between quotation marks?). Mark Sarvas points me to a blog I haven't heard of, that belonging to poet and translator George Szirtes, and commands me to "[r]ead it. And when you're done, go back and read his archives. All of them. Really." Well, all right.

Then I get to one of my favourite blogs, Jonah Lehrer's The Frontal Cortex, and I slow myself down as I always do so as to give him my full attention. Each post is a complete, discrete idea, and generally follows a single structure: introduction of a particular study related to neuroscience, discussion of practical ramifications, conclusion. What I like is the way he clearly delineates the philosophical and real-life applications of these ventures in hard science. These last entries are no exception: there is a fascinating study on commuting, which I was just thinking about yesterday while stuck in traffic for an hour and a half after meeting a friend for lunch (I believe my conclusion was "Never again"), and then another fascinating study on how adults can trigger in themselves a childlike imagination. I thought: yes, this is useful, the next time I sit down to brainstorm a paper or a film subject or ... but I read on, read to the end, and I began to forget what I had read only a paragraph before, forgot the title of the post, and began to sense that my retention of this marvelous idea was going to be temporary, like a ball skidding across ice.

I felt that this was a good place to stop and reflect. Why, exactly, do I read these things? Why is it difficult to turn away a promising link or the hope of a new, excellent blog? They are of course tools, and very useful ones at that - but tools need to be used to become worthwhile. We might better think of these tools as fuel - coal, for instance - that needs burning in order to grant the light and heat we crave. Coal as coal does nothing. To bring the metaphor full circle: if you have one piece of coal, you treasure it and use it through and through, until it has provided to you all that it can. But the internet is like a massive storehouse with shelves and shelves of coal, and we're given a bottomless shopping cart and it's like one of those games where whatever you put in your cart before time runs out is yours to keep. And how beautiful all the coal is.

The result is that nothing is burned through, but everything is singed - here a bit of Thoreau, here a few passages of Wittgenstein, here a handful of verses from Shelley. I doubt it would be an exaggeration to say that I've already accumulated enough coal for ten lifetimes. One could (and one has, in the past) easily devote an entire life to the study of a few thinkers, and few artists. You could easily spend a year just studying Emerson. He is one of the most important thinkers in my life, and yet I've only read a few of his essays, and no more.

There comes a time in all this accumulation, a time I've no doubt already long passed, when more and more becomes less and less. If we are born as blank books and spend our lives filling the pages, then I might say (perhaps unfairly) that I've become all index and no content. But what am I supposed to do? There's so goddamn much of it all.

I'd like to stay, but I've just downloaded the complete filmography of Terence Malick and am halfway through John Banville's The Untouchable, not to mention the 53 items still waiting in my Google Reader queue. Good night.