Tiresome apologies for blogging.

No, not from me.  

+ + +

I don't have anyone in particular in mind today.  Ever since partway through my last pregnancy I've had trouble putting my butt in the chair long enough to produce decent blog posts at a decent clip.  I managed to blog about our European adventure reasonably well, but I've gotten out of the habit.  Or into the bad habit of throwing things up on Facebook, and then being rid of them and going blithely on my way.

I bring this up because... lately whenever I read some well-meaning mother blogger bemoaning how blogging is actually a Bad Habit that is taking her away too much from What Is Really Important, and she's really going to shut down the computer and go play with her kids, well, I've lost patience with it.  Not going to nod and say "I know what you mean" or "Good for you" any more.

+  + +

I mean, you do what you have to do, or what the Good Lord is leading you to do, by all means.   And sure, it's possible to make an idol of anything -- all can be done to unhealthy excess, including cooking fresh meals for your family, reading great literature, getting vigorous exercise, washing your hands after going to the toilet, and giving to worthy causes.  So yeah, can one blog too much?  Assuredly.

But.  Blogging as general bad habit that represents, by default, a retreat from the three-dimensional world, a failure to connect with real human beings, and an unhealthy choice to chronicle life rather than experience it?  Especially for mothers of families?

No.  Not playing along with that implication anymore, ever.

(I promise to keep my mouth shut about it during the three days before Lent starts when everyone logs on one last time to explain why they are giving up blogging for Lent.  It's a perfectly fine thing to give up for Lent, because Lent is a time for giving up legitimate pleasures and taking on voluntary sacrifices.  But other than that?  Done.)

+ + +

Personal blogs are nothing more, and nothing less, than a modern combination of three very old concepts.

(1) Diaries

(2) Letters

(3) Philosophical treatises.

The third category probably needs little comment from me, so let's turn to the first two.

Diaries and letters are of incalculable historical importance.  And they are especially important in the historical assessment of the lives of women throughout the ages.  Often it is letters and diaries that provide us with the clearest glimpse into the day-to-day existence of real human beings in that faraway country, the past.   

In the case of women, we're talking mostly about women of the intellectual elite, for most of history:  wealthy women who enjoyed the privilege of education, or cloistered women.  But not always, and less so as time went on and society cast a wider net from which to draw its literate citizens.

+ + +

Texts sent long-distance from one person to another, and texts sent back in reply, have been an established means of carrying on significant intellectual discourse since long before the mails were anything like reliable.  And we possess evidence of this, in the form of the physical texts that were physically sent from one place to the other.  

In all cases we take these letters as evidence of connection, as something that mitigated isolation or prevented it.  

We have letters to and from St. Hildegard of Bingen:  women such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, and men such as Bernard of Clairvaux, wrote to her seeking advice and consolation, and she wrote back.

We have letters of Hrotsvit, a tenth-century nun, who put the letters as prefaces to her volumes of plays and saints' lives, the result being that her audience is "her readers:"  she would never meet them nor know their names, but she wanted to address them with a kind of apology and explanation of why she phrased things the way she did.

We have many letters of St. Jane Frances de Chantal, who wrote on matters both practical and spiritual, corresponding with both men and women; and including a number of "circular letters" addressed to the other Visitation Sisters as a group.  

We have the letters of Queen Caroline of Ansbach, who was undoubtedly a busy person but who must have regarded her correspondence as a vital part of that busy-ness, as she kept up a lively dialogue with philosophers, physicians, and politicians as well as other royals, and served as a mover of public opinion -- for instance in her carefully researched and highly publicized decision to have her children inoculated against smallpox.

More recently we have the letters of other public figures.  One of my favorite volumes of letters is The Habit of Being, gathered from Flannery O'Connor's correspondence; but while O'Connor's letters are a good example here, let's remember the women who wrote to her, too -- in particular Betty Hester, whose identity was preserved only as "A" until recently, and who exchanged hundreds of letters on topics personal and spiritual with O'Connor over nine years.

Furthermore we have preserved the writings of many women because of their correspondence with historically important men:

 -- We have a reconstructed letter from an otherwise unknown widow named Hedybia, who wrote to St. Jerome (right to the source, so to speak!) with a list of difficult questions about events in the Gospels.  

 -- We have the letters of spiritual direction of St. Francis de Sales; many of his correspondents who wrote to him describing their situations and seeking guidance were married women, women who had busy lives, children to educate and households to run.  I daresay it was the vicarious experience that St. Francis acquired through acting as confessor and spiritual director to so many worldly, married, busy women that gave him the insight necessary to compose such a practical work as Introduction to the Devout Life, which advises the busy person living in the world on how to put God in first place despite so many duties.  Indeed, the Introduction is written in epistolary form to "Philothea"  -- and there was a real "Philothea," Louise de Châtel, Mme. de Charmoisy, whose correspondence with Francis de Sales led directly to the saint's composition of this classic of spiritual direction.

 + + +

We do not say of Queen Caroline, "She neglected her household duties and her social obligations by constantly writing."  We do not say of Betty Hester, "If only she had not spent so much time scribbling letters to celebrities, think how much farther she might have gone in her work."  We do not say of the women writing to their spiritual directors, "All that navel-gazing takes the mind off of the really important things."  We do not say of St. Hildegard, "If she hadn't spent so much time chronicling those visions of hers and recording them for posterity, maybe she would have been able to really experience them to the fullest."

 + + +

This is how we connect now.  

Yeah, I have dozens of Facebook friends too, and they can't all be my besties.

And they're not.  You know they're not.  It's the same with you.

 There are a handful, though -- some who read and comment on my blog, some who write blogs I read daily, some who exchange emails with me, a few of the people that I check in with several times a day via Facebook.  

You know who you are.  Hello, friends.  I've "exchanged letters with you" for years now.  I've "kept up a lively correspondence" with you.  I've sought advice, consolation, spiritual direction.  I've written treatises in response to your inspiration, and I've made queries that inspired treatises from you in return.

Blogs for sure -- but even Twitter and Facebook and whatever comes after those -- I know I am really connecting with real people.  Yes, I have a family.  Yes, I have responsibilities.  You have jobs and I have jobs.  And yet, making time for each other to meet one on one -- it's not just allowable; it's good.  Intellectual life is not something we must fit in the crevices of our "real" lives.  It is in some ways the realest life we have, the life of human beings being human together in the world of knowing and expressing.

So, no more apologies.  I'll stop my ears, until you have something more important to say.

Comments

[Kate]

Thank you for this defense of the life of the mind and the value of correspondence. For those of us who are perhaps more comfortable interacting online than in person, it can be tricky judging the line between worthwhile avocation and character flaw. But (as I used to remind college friends who complained about lack of exposure to the "real" world), there isn't any interaction with other people that *isn't* happening in reality. If we start thinking of any set of relationships as "not really real," we risk treating the people involved as not really real.

As you say, there are real friendships formed online. When I winnowed my FB list, I briefly considered cutting it to "people I know in real life." But I quickly realized that I would lose too much if I were to limit my interactions to people I've met face to face--and that for much of my married life, cooped up with small children, a good portion of my "real life" has been spent online.

[Jenny]

Three cheers!

I've not quite understood the shunning of online interaction as a guilty pleasure. Can you spend too much time on blogs or check FB too often? Absolutely. But it would then be a sin of excess not of the medium itself. In these days of social isolation, many of us thrive through our interactions on blogs and social media. For some the choice isn't between online friendships and real life friendships, but between online friendships and loneliness. For others the internet provides an outlet to converse over and above their daily in-person correspondence about topics that may or may not be interesting to those physically around them. And all of these things are good. Every online conversation happens between real people and real connections made between real people is not a bad habit that needs to be expunged in order to live a better life.

[Erin]

Here, here!! Totally agree and have thought this for a long time.

[Amy F]

Whoo-hoo!

I only rarely write in my own blog, but it has been around for 9 years now and when I need to remember something from 2006, my blog is the place I am most likely to find it. That whole life-with-two-kids time is pretty fuzzy and I'm glad that's the chunk I blogged most heavily. It inspires me to come back and blog the big stuff at least, my birth stories and overviews on how I'm homeschooling.

[Margaret @ Minnesota Mom]

"Work hard every day at increasing your purity of heart, which consists in appraising things and weighing them in the balance of God's will."
— St. Francis de Sales

He says it better than I can. ;)

[Emily J]

Can I borrow this explanation? I have a hard time explaining, sometimes to myself, why, when there are so many other things I could be doing, I prefer to sit down and blog. When I write in a diary, I don't compose my thoughts very well. And the few letters I send aren't usually about my thoughts, but about our doings, or are congratulatory or sympathetic. I like your idea that blogging provides the opportunity to practice philosophizing (emphasis on practice, in my case), to record memories, and to form and continue relationships. The challenge is balancing the time needed to think about what and how to say things with the time needed for everything else in life!

[MrsDarwin]

I wasn't able to comment on my phone when I first read this, so I'm returning to say brava and thank you. There are so many important things in life, and I'm also tired of reading these blog apologias for not blogging (often seemingly calculated to draw comments and links, because otherwise if one really had a deep philosophical conviction that blogging was a waste of time, the best thing to do would be to just stop without writing a clickbait post).

[Melanie B]

Hear! Hear! For the deep life of the mind and long distance correspondence carried out between real people, for the daily trivia too and all the sharing of recipes and housekeeping and parenting tips and grousing about non-sleeping babies. All these things are very, very good indeed. And we are all so much the richer for them. Life would be lonely indeed without you and all my other blog friends.

[Sarah]

This is my first visit to your blog, which was linked to by Brandy at afterthoughtsblog.net .
I must say you have very well helped me land on your side of this fence that Ive been straddling :) I just told someone last week that I stopped using FB because it was too much of a draw on my time. I have been trying to come to terms with this whole topic for several years now. Should I remain lonely and isolated from others who think and do things similarly to me, in turn, trying to find greater satisfaction and contentment with my time spent at home with my young children and those few friends I have contact with physically? Or is it actually a legitimate use of my time to connect with like-minded people online and otherwise pursue an intellectual life for myself, even if it means I don't keep my house perfectly composed? After years (5ish maybe?) of what feels like intellectual, and perhaps spiritual, starvation, I am convinced that I need more community, more exposure to Great Ideas, and more of Jesus :) Thank you for this post releasing me of any guilt I might otherwise have experienced while pursuing those things!
With Blessings, Sarah

[Bearing]

I find FB to be a double-edged sword. I have to be kind of vigilant about not clicking on certain things so that my use of it is more about connecting with people and less about wasting time. But when I use it with self-discipline, it is great.

[Amber]

I've been thinking about this ever since you posted it and while I agree with you, I can't figure out how to get past in my own mind the feeling like I can't blog until I've caught up on the laundry, made sure the kitchen is clean, cooked the appropriate meals, pre-read the kids' school stuff, cleaned off my desk, posted pictures to the family blog, etc. etc. etc.

Which means I post maybe once a month? If that? And half the time only because I think, "oh, screw it, I'm never going to actually be that on top of things." Maybe I need to figure out how to cultivate that mentality more?? And how on earth do I let go of that perfectionism?

[bearing]

I don't know. It's certainly the reason I fall into the habit of less blogging and more FB (which is good, but not as satisfying as blogging). FB is quicker.