All Intensive Purposes

Michael Berube finds himself blogging more:

The funny thing is that when I came to Durham, I imagined that I would “cut back drastically” on blogging (as I wrote three weeks ago), because I would be spending all my time in study and meditation. But lo! I have kept blogging anyway. Why is that? I tried to cut back, but, well. . . . Ahem. Well, partly it’s because I have not had unbroken 16-hour work days since I was 24 years old, and I am finding them too vast for comprehension. But mostly it’s because blogging turns out, in a curiously virtual-yet-tangible kind of way, to be one of the ways in which I now apprehend the world (and one of the ways in which the world apprehends me—and yes, I’m aware of the fact that “apprehend” suggests both “perceive” and “take into custody.” . . .).

This reminds me, like so many things do, of The Crying of Lot 49:

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central paintings of a triptych, titled ‘Bordando el Manto Terrestre’, were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.