Reopening the Treasury

 I originally started this blog over a decade ago, when I was just a student and had much more time for writing.  Business of life (and a feeling that no one was reading this blog anyway) led me to give it up and leave the field fallow for almost a decade.  Now, though, I feel it is time to restart it, with a bit of a different focus: the main posts will now be translations.

A major question might be: why revive a ten-year-defunct blog for a somewhat new venture?  Why not simply start fresh, with a clean slate?  That's typical nowadays: a new brand for a new venture.

First, there is the simple fact that there might still be a few old-time readers of the blog around, to give a few views; second, there is the fact that the amount of content already here might give a bump in search engines (though I don't know much about how SEO has changed in the last ten years).  Yet those are simply small, practical matters, only really useful if I cared much about earning money off of this.

The real reason is that the blog is still me.  True, I originally wrote it under a pseudonym (Wolfsbane) before changing it; true, I have changed in the past ten years, just as everyone does.  But my past is still my past.  It used to be said that "the Internet is forever": anything posted on the Internet will survive, somehow, to be tracked down again.  Such was the optimism of the old Internet; but the intervening years and losses--Use.net groups, forums, bulletin boards, link rot: so many records vanished--have shown that the Internet's memory is not quite what it was thought to be.  Paywalls and rebrandings have hastened such deletions; old YouTube videos can suddenly be privated and vanish; one's old brand is considered a detriment to a new venture, and promptly erased.  I remember once trying to track down a recipe whose link I'd saved: the link was dead, because the author had rebranded herself a few times, and many of her old recipes had simply vanished.  The Wayback Machine saved the day for me that time, though it's not infallible: some pages no one thought to save, and some are designed in order to be unsavable (such as "infinite scroll" forums).  So the Internet is more fragile than we used to think.

But if that's so, why not try for a blank slate?  Despite this fragility, the Internet's memory can still be shockingly strong: I looked and saw that this old blog had been saved by the Wayback Machine numerous times.  It's already been sealed in our best Internet vault, so it cannot be simply wished away.  My blogging past is my past, and I cannot deny it; better to embrace it, create a continuity, than to claim that I am some Internet new-born.  Why try to hide what cannot be hid?

The fact that I am an independent scholar is certainly a help here: I have no institutional facade to protect.  Is there anything unbecoming in my old posts?  I hope not, but I haven't re-read them all to find out.  My old projects--the Church Documents Index, the Iconic Icons series, the very-short-lived series on Byzantine neumes--will probably stay ruins, long-built then abandoned.  My new project will be an ongoing series of translations, with a linked index.  

I've cleaned up the layout a bit, removing a few pieces of cruft, such as the massive word cloud of labels at the bottom, and the links to other Byzantine Catholic blogs (many of them defunct or rarely posting).  The "Catholic links and blog" section is now simply eparchial and Vatican links, with a few other resources, though I'm not sure how useful it is either; it may go by the wayside for simplicity's sake as well.

This will not be my first attempt at a translation-collection: I hand-coded a website a few years ago--Undusted Texts--with a few translations added.  I really like the aesthetics of that site, but the backend takes more work; Blogger is quite simple in comparison.  My index of translations will include links to my Undusted Texts translations as well; again, why hide what cannot be hid?  Why deny what I myself did?

The Fathers and other theologians will still be the main source of content; my increased love of poetry will probably appear here as well, as it did in Undusted Texts.  Perhaps bits of Catholic or Christian philosophy might make their appearance as well--I've been meaning to dabble in the Christian personalism of Emmanuel Mounier.  All will be free, though; if anyone starts reading, I might create a donation page, but my paid-translation ventures will be elsewhere.  Making money off of scholarly work is a goal, but there is also a good in providing it for free.  Josef Pieper argued against the whole idea of "intellectual work," as he thought the toil of true leisure is a good-in-itself, a realm separate from the money-world, freed from the "total-work" Leviathan.  I've not yet fully subscribed to this idea (partly because I need to make money somehow), but I do believe freely sharing intellectual wealth is a good, and probably the ideal good.  (Though not yet a daily Linux user, I certainly lean towards the open-source philosophy.)  

So here I am, reopening my old treasury, jettisoning a few outdated signs and posters, but rubbishing none of the relics themselves.  My past work is my past me, and my past me--my chain of past me's--build my present me.  To try to deny my past me's is not to destroy them, simply to hide them; so I'm blatantly displaying my connection to my past writing.  

That's enough about me, though: now is the time to start forging new treasures for the treasury.  Since the Great Fast has just started, my early posts will be related to the Fast; in particular, I hope to post a selection from St. Ambrose's On Elijah and Fasting.  (My languages have certainly expanded from "only Spanish" when I began this blog.)  Then I might draw on some Greek homilies for the Fast.  After that, who knows?

May the Theotokos and our Holy Father Joseph guide me in this new endeavor, as they did in the last.

Nota Bene: For more about leisure and intellectual work, see Josef Pieper's Leisure and Cult.  Unfortunately, it cannot be found in English under the original name; instead, in Alexander Dru's translation, it's retitled Leisure: The Basis of Culture, even though the German Kult refers to worship and ritual, not culture.  Liturgy and festivity were key themes for Pieper, in this book and others.