Imagining I'm alive

On my commute this morning, I came across a description in the September 7 New Yorker that is a fair description of my blogging. It's Jane Kramer on the late, long essay "On Vanity" by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)¹:

It is a meditation on dying and, at the same time, on writing—or, you could say, on writing oneself to life in the face of death, on getting "lost" in words and in "the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings" and in the kind of space where "my pen and my mind both go a-roaming." ("My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too," he says. "I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first.") And it draws pretty much the whole cast of characters from his library into the conversation....

The phrase "writing oneself to life" echoed a phrase I'd used a few days previously in an email to Joe:

If my mind isn't sparking, I feel dead. If it sparks a bit, I imagine that I'm alive. My first year working for IBM...I kept myself alive only by reading, reading, reading....

The flint of my mind is sparked by being struck by one stone or another of what I read, and my blog posts tend to be the kindling that the spark has set ablaze.
    Is it ironic that so many of my posts, produced as "writing myself to life," allude to or squarely confront my death? Only if it was ironic that Montaigne's "meditation on dying" was at the same time (to Kramer) a way of keeping himself alive in the face of death.

Previously unnoticed juxtaposition

It just struck me, the juxtaposition of my blog profile's "about me" quote from Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—too?

and the final stanza of Wallace Steven's poem "The Snow Man," which I quoted yesterday:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The size and age (and average temperature) of the universe, the brevity of our lives, and the finality of death do have a way of emphasizing our nothingness.
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1. "Me, Myself, and I," by Jane Kramer, in the Literary Lives column, p. 39 of the September 7 New Yorker.