BitterSweetLife

The precise origins of this blog, kind of like the source of Shakespeare’s genius and the birth of the world, are shrouded in mystery.

It all began last May. I think. For a reason that is now opaque, I was fooling around with Blogger’s timestamp function back then, and now my earliest archives date to June ‘04. We may never know exactly when I responded to some primal urge and started blogging.

However, I’ve noticed that various other people generate some hoopla over their One-Year Anniversaries, so I’m not about to waste my opportunity. The chances are excellent that BitterSweetLife’s OYA has already passed, so it’s time to get on it.

Let’s see. You should know that when this blog began, it was simply whim. There’s that giddy period when the novelty of “publishing” provokes you into posting all sorts of half-cooked stuff (i.e. vacation pictures with silly captions) with the idea that you’ll eventually take over the world. Later you realize you’ll be lucky if your own family members read your blog. But those of us who survive that euphoric honeymoon period eventually realize we’ve stumbled onto a good thing. The luckier ones find some sort of vital topic or quest to stabilize their output, and that’s me in a nutshell. I realized I had this concept of “bittersweetness” as a grid for life and it seemed as good a central theme as any.

At the formative moment, I had just read Joseph Epstein’s Snobbery, was fairly impressed by the spiffy blog of a rediscovered friend, and was probably drinking coffee. Don’t ask me what Epstein has to do with blogging, because I’m not entirely sure, but somehow it helped the writing progress. I dashed off my first post, threw in some rag poetry, and haven’t ever really looked back. Apparently my impulse toward bittersweetness was good, because I’m still writing about it. As my brother pointed out the other day, most people do not see “bittersweet” (i.e. sad movies and dark chocolate) as a very profound statement. In contrast, I’ve come as close as I can to developing bittersweetness into a philosophy.

Incidentally, I still think it’s helpful; I still think it works. The question of good and evil, joy and pain—how it enters our lives broken up and mixed together, “the sadness in the sweet, the sweetness in the sad” *—weighs upon us all. As a phenomenon it demands an answer. I think Jesus Christ is the best conceivable explanation.

I could link you up to a bunch of “crucial posts,” but the arguable top three are already in the sidebar, and frankly, who wants to read more than three profoundly insightful, scathingly humorous, surprisingly true posts at one time? If you want more overtly “bittersweet” musings, a simple keyword search will take you far. Bittersweetness tends to be implicit in most of what I write, of course.

Well, enough said, I think. The one-year anniversary has been observed with all the pomp and ceremony appropriate…to a one-year anniversary.


* From “Daisy,” by Francis Thompson.