Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Updating The Blog Roll = A Little Depressing

It had been awhile since I had gone through my blog roll with a fine toothed comb. Now I know why. I hadn't realized how many of my "ye olde tyme" blog friends had moved onto other things. I know that is in the nature of this type of communication, but still it can result in a kind of melancholy when you delete old links that no longer lead to anything.

Even some of the links that remain lead to sites that have not been updated for a year or more, or others that still posting but are far less active then they used to be. As if life itself isn't transient enough, I find myself affected by the hyper-transient character of the blogosphere.

Really sometimes I wonder if I was cut out to live in the times I inhabit. I know change is the perpetual state of the human condition, but in past eras the slower pace of change could supply at least a pseudo-permanence to things. Things could endure long enough for people to get used to them, and though they didn't last forever, they were around long enough to become part of the shared experience of many. For that reason, change could take on a generational aspect. Yes, change could signify ordinary decay be it physical or social in nature, but things past continued to live in the minds of older generations. For the younger generations change, because it took its time in coming, could build and grow in its significance. Thus, change could be viewed as growth or decay, and sometimes as both at the same time.

Today, however, the sheer pace of our life (technological and otherwise) makes it difficult to see change as anything other then decay pure and simple. Sure, we see the rise of things, but one could hardly sit back and take them in before they begin to crumble before our very eyes to be replaced by something else which will, all too quickly, undergo the same process.

It's this process which rubs me the wrong way. I'm simply not prone to adopting an Epicurean attitude to the things of this world. For the Epicurean, change is the only meaning possible of our existence, especially the change known as decay and death. Anything that speaks to a permanence (pseudo or otherwise) is a lie pure and simple.

Everything that makes me who I am fights against this tendency. The contemporary world seems hell bent on making our existence into nothing but a collection of ephemera. (Written ephemera being limited to 140 characters, please.) However, I think I am something more then that, just as I believe the people I've put in my blog roll are also more than that.

Blogs may not be the best place to look for pseudo-permanence, but there are precious few places in the world which offer ground much better to look.

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