Blogging again. I won't get very far if I only sign on every six months, but I guess that's better than never. I hope to do a real post soon.

The Blogger interface for posting is even better than it was the last time I tried it.

I've spent a couple of hours resuscitating my two Blogger blogs. Blogger is wonderfully forgiving. This blog had one post from mid-2005, the other had a half-dozen from early 2004, but everything was still there.

I just started G. K. Chesterton's brief study of Robert Louis Stevenson, which I've read several times before. As familiar as some passages are, there are others—and this is just in the first ten pages—that seem almost new. The words on the page are the same, but the state of my mind isn't. I'm bringing an extra year's worth of experience and thought to those words. So the situation, words+mind, is different. If this didn't happen, if there was nothing new to think about, the book wouldn't be worth rereading.

Yesterday, trying to decide which book of Chesteton's to pick up, I considered several that I haven't reread lately—Heretics, A Handful of Authors, George Bernard Shaw. I'm sure that any of them would evoke new thoughts, but none was the right book, though I couldn't have said exactly why. Maybe it was something about those books, or maybe it was because the book on Stevenson was what I really wanted to read, even if it had only been a little over a year since the last time I read it, and nothing else would do.

I'm not sure if “mind” is the word I want here. “Intellect” seems too heavy, but “imagination” isn't sufficient, because there is an element of intellect involved. This is a problem, though, only in terms of the common use of these words. The richness of the the word “mind” as used by Lionel Trilling is exactly what I want. The common use of words like mind, intellect, imagination is based on an inadequate notion of the mind in the first place, which Trilling spent his life combating. See especially The Liberal Imagination.

I reread The Liberal Imagination last month. I've been reading and rereading this book for almost forty years, and it can still startle me. Memory tends to wear off the sharp corners of an author's thoughts--maybe just because it assimilates the author's thoughts to the reader's mind. Getting reacquainted with the real author can be as unsettling as meeting someone you haven't seen in a long time.

I've spent an hour or two on this brief post. I won't get very far if I keep that up! But it's not anything new—I once typed several drafts of a note to a repairman about a malfunctioning word processor during a community college class. This blog is intended to be informal, just notes and comments, so going slow isn't a problem unless I decide it is.

Besides, the new Blogger interface is a notable improvement. I started another Blogger blog early in 2004, and didn't keep it up very long. I don't remember exactly what posting was like then, but it's a lot easier now.