On things past

Praeterita was the title of the great English writer John Ruskin's reflections on his life. In a sense we are always looking backwards at things that are now past as soon as we try to describe our experience. Ruskin's choice of the Latin word, with its archaic and somewhat grandiose feeling, was well-suited to his manner of thought and his writing. I have chosen to echo it not just from philosophical principle, but because my work involves reflections on personal narrative - mostly a childhood growing up in an English mining town in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ruskin also said that he would write "frankly, garrulously, and at ease; speaking of what it gives me joy to remember at any length I like ... and passing in total silence things that I have no pleasure in reviewing." And Ruskin did indeed omit much of what would fascinate a modern audience (such as his unconsummated marriage to one of the Pre-Raphaelite's models). Although Ruskin would have been appalled at the contemporary desire to reveal every aspect of our selves to as large an audience as possible, those words seem to me like a good definition of how to write a blog. 

And so I end my first  - short, not very garrulous - blog posting.