Be Faithful to your Obsessions

I heard the quote “stay true to your obsessions” in an interview about the writer J.G. Ballard and was drawn to it. However, I rarely take what I hear at face value and almost always look it up. The true quote from Ballard is:

My advice to anyone in any field is to be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker.

The lonely tree in the forest

I haven’t written for several months, largely because it all seemed so pointless and there are so many other things to do with my time. “Everyone” writes a blog because they want their views heard, but that rarely happens; most readers are family and close friends. “Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.”

Hardly surprising. By June 2008, Technorati was indexing 112.8 million blogs, and supposedly the blogosphere is doubling about once every 6 and a half months, which, since there have been about 3 sets of 6.5 months since June 2008, would put the current number of blogs at somewhere around 900 million blogs. Hard to believe, but even if the number is a mere fraction of that there’s no way most blogs have much of a readership.

I have definite views about what’s happening in the world, but the sad fact is that talking or writing about them changes very little – basically nothing. A few people can influence by talking – Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly – but they are generally preaching to the choir of the struggling white males who think their problems are the fault of immigrants, liberals, the French, and so on. But for most of us, we need to take action, and not just personal action, but political action.

So I figured there’s little point in sharing my views in a blog. It’s a bit like being the tree in the forest that falls alone – does anyone hear?

I decided to focus on my books and to move to a website rather than a blog. So I duly bought a web domain and paid for two years of hosting, but have done nothing with it. So I’m still here at the blog site, at least for the foreseeable future.

The only reason I’m writing is that I heard a great quote from the author J.G. Ballard which inspired me to write something down, but I’ll leave that for another day.