Another One of My Sporadic Assessments

It's hard to believe that in a couple of months (on July 8) this blog will be five years old. I see that the average lifespan of a blog is two years. My other blog, The Power of Babel ( https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/ ), is a staggering 17 years old, almost old enough to vote, premiering on Jan. 27, 2008. It’s still tottering along in a rather elderly manner: it began as a look at action figures, went through several permutations, and survives as a sort of ‘image dump’, almost a Tumblr, where I post my gleanings (every Sunday) from several places, pictures that I want to remember. or which interest me.

I’ve never been very lucky with the names I’ve picked out for my blogs. After I chose ‘Power of Babel’, I found out there was a book titled The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, by John McWhorter, and that has always trailed across any searches I’ve wanted to make. After I chose ‘Niche of Time’ (a rather clever pun I thought, describing a little corner where I would tuck memories away) I discovered there was a sort of jewelry store called Niche of Time that had its own website. Another unexpected entanglement.

My ‘Niche of Time’ began as “A Biographical Inventory of Books”, a catalog of my books, basically, and what they mean to me and why, charting what their history with me is and what impact they have been on my life and thinking.  Also, I wanted to simply record and count them. The Archive slowly grows with each book I get. Niche of Time grew to include The Shadow Library (books that I used to have) and straight-out biographical material that I had made over the years, including Diaries. It further expanded into DVDs, CDs, records, calendars, family ‘stuff,’ and, bringing it around from 17 years ago on Power of Babel, action figures (in greater detail). And my ‘writings’, poetry, and short stories. I’ve also enjoyed putting together related ‘themes’, like Alice in Wonderland or Beowulf or most lately Shakespeare, gathering together the stuff I have or had on a subject, which make a kind of timeline in themselves.

Lately I have included what may be called ‘notes and quotes’, not quite essays but gatherings of thoughts on various subjects, trying to clarify, at least to myself, some position or belief. I hate having to consider religion or politics (those two taboo subjects) or even philosophy, but I feel I should “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” To that end I must try to summarize the decades of thought that have led me to my conclusions, to show they are not just snap decisions or prejudices. But I would much rather just gab about pop culture and other such frivolous entertainment, though even pop culture is downstream from theology.

I suppose the upshot of this meandering meditation is the fact that when this blog turns 5 in July, I’ll be a few weeks away from being 62 myself. That’s the age I should be rambling about my life to my kids, or even grandkids, which I do not have. I can talk to my brother about our childhood, or make the occasional nostalgic observation to my nephew, but who do I have to really download my life onto, what captive audience that can’t really escape? It’s true I’m not really a very detailed repository of my own parents’ histories, but then I don’t think they ever thought of such a thing. It’s much more important how you feel about someone, what kind of person they were, and I think they knew that. But I am cursed with a semi-literate longing to record things, to express myself.

Someday, if someone wants to know what old Uncle Brer was like, or even remember me (if they knew me in life), they can turn to this blog (if it still survives) and try to recreate me, to a certain degree. They might even be surprised to find out something about me they never knew. Some stray reader (a friend I’ll never see) may come across the Niche of Time and find a kindred spirit. Anyway, in the meantime, I preserve my own memories from the gnawing of time and the frailty of the human brain. In time, I could myself be running across stuff recorded here with a dim response of surprise and recognition, as I tell me my own story, past self to some unimaginable future self. As old Mommy Fortuna might cackle, “So there’s my immortality, eh?!”

“[The Niche of Time] evolved into a sort of omnium gatherum, or commonplace book, of my interests, possessions, and personal history. I now like to think of it as a sort of scrapbook my people can leaf through when I am gone, or their children can go over if they ever wonder what old Uncle Brer was all about, or at least the better parts of him, not the obvious bunch of inadequacies that goes slumping through the day and that your Aunt would no doubt gladly give you an earful about. In this world, just a pale, enigmatic shadow cast on the mind in the end.” – June 6, 2024