by Jerome du Bois
On November 5, 1997, Christopher Hitchens delivered an address at Columbia University which, when it found its way into print (in Salmagundi 118-119, S/S 1998), was called "Secular Values and Republican Virtues: Resisting the Virtual and the Vicarious." (Not available online, sadly. It's a gold mine.)
If you're wondering about the subtitle, the essay is full of examples, but I want to use one that Hitchens gives towards the end. He quotes the Hungarian writer Georg Konrad (one of Hitchens's favorites, but not mine). Now, remember that Hitchens was speaking in 1997, when "online diairies" were just beginning, and that Konrad wrote this ten years earlier, in 1987, in a time and place where there was hardly any internet at all -- still only samizdat -- much less a blogosphere:
Have a lived life instead of a career. Put your days in the safekeeping of good taste. Lived freedom will compensate you for a few losses. If you don't like the style of others, cultivate your own. Get to know the tricks of reproduction, be a self-publisher even in conversation, and then the joy of working can fill your days.
It seems odd but true to me that the evanescent, electronic blogosphere -- prickly, fermenting, resisting categorization, sprouting eleventeen heads every minute -- is anything but virtual, anywhere but vicarious. Bloggers wrestle their lives into words and then present them on the screen. To me, it's the Great Conversation my teachers used to talk about in high school.
And Catherine and I are proud to be part of it.
Posted by Jerome at January 5, 2004 02:17 PM | TrackBack