LOGORRHEA

On June 1, 2009 I began blogging regularly.  The Philosopher's Stone was actually created two years earlier, but I did not begin posting regular comments then.  Today is the day before Memorial Day, which means that by rights it ought to be May 29th, but in fact it is only May 25th, thanks to the insatiable American desire for three day holidays.  On the actual May 31st, this coming Saturday, I will have been blogging for exactly five years, which is to say 1826 days [including one Leap Day.]  This little commemoration is my 1821st post, so it seems quite likely that when five years rolls around next Saturday, I will have put up on this blog an average of one post a day!  Included in those blog posts are an 800 page autobiography, posted seriatim, and another roughly two hundred fifty thousand words of tutorials, mini-tutorials, micro-tutorials, and appreciations, as well as an enormous number of quibbles, cavils, celebrations, and curiosities.  None of which includes the book-length exposition of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy that constitutes the material of my other blog.  I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that I have a raging and incurable case of logorrhea.

When I finished writing my doctoral dissertation in the early Spring of 1957, I was seized by the terrible fear that I would never write anything again.  Each time I completed another book and sent it off to the publisher, I experienced a return of that primal anxiety.  When I write for this blog, a variant of that fear haunts me.  "Will I find something, anything, to say tomorrow?" I ask myself.  You might think that after one thousand eight hundred twenty-one posts, I would develop a certain confident expectation, but alas, it is not so.  If I am fortunate enough to be granted a moment's awareness of the onset of my death, I rather imagine that my last conscious thought will be, "Well, I shan't have to post anything tomorrow."