It took me a while to realize that I made a connection between writing and immortality. PrincessLeia.com is a monster of randomness. Sorting it’s contents was incredibly difficult because the subjects are so varied. Very often I’ll take up a new thing, even something that seems normal like learning how to cook and keep an orderly house, and make a website about it. Going through the steps I took, spending a great deal of time to design and develop a page that will preserve that knowledge in some form. Why do I have this drive? Who is it for? I wasn’t sure until this past weekend.
The loss of my grandfather is difficult, the world lost a great mind when he died. But I’m comforted in the fact that we did not lose all his knowledge and ideas, he wrote down a great deal of what he thought about and we have much of what he has written. When I want inspiration from him I can still pull out one of the several papers, letters or articles that he’s written and read it. And I have the Heritage Trails project where I’m attempting to bring some of these things to the internet for a whole new audience.
The loss of my father is not comforted by a wealth of writings. He went to college for journalism, and spent some time writing, but not much survived over the years. All I have is a paper he wrote in High School. An aunt collected some papers (mostly fiction) of his that he had and was writing shortly before he died, and should be sending me them soon, but it’s not much. I’m absolutely heartbroken that I have so little to tap in to. The death of my father really hit me when I was cooking something and thought “hey I should call up dad and ask him $method/$tip” – and realized that he was dead and the wealth of information he had about cooking was gone.
And so, while my memory of my father’s ideas may shift and become unclear over time, my grandfather’s ideas are right there on paper. In 30 years the world will still have an accurate snapshot of my grandfather’s mind, but my father’s will be lost in time.
So why do I have this drive? Because I want to live forever, I have the natural want not to be forgotten. And I’m a writer my thoughts will swirl around in my head until I and let them out by writing them down.
And who is it for? Everyone, but mostly me. It’s all a self-preservation exercise that happens to have the side effect of being helpful to other people. If I didn’t have the internet I’m sure I’d have reams of paper with thoughts and ideas, and journals that I just wrote for myself all over the place.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot from several angles.
Is this all very selfish?
Am I too prolific when my journal is taken into account for anyone to ever want to spend the time and access my thoughts?
Is this a bad habit? Should I spend less time cataloging my life and more time living it?
And so many other questions.
Then, this past weekend, a friend mentioned that I should “Do something” with something that I had written because he thought it was good. And this morning, I received an email from a fellow who thanked me for the cooking section of my site, said the Debian mplayer how-to was very helpful and that he now understand how to use screen(1).
These things quieted my mind a lot.
With all that I have written and put together I’ve created something wonderful and helpful that I enjoy!
That’s what matters.
But I think examining this was important. I may shift my focus back to preserving (on PrincessLeia.com) some of the more important things I write about, lest they get lost on this journal between entries about weekend activities and work.