The Best Weblogs
When a quote is floating around in your head, it is sometimes best to get it out, otherwise it will occupy too many of your waking hours. When a quote reminds you of weblogs, then you have a duty to blog it!
The quote is from page 162 of my battered Penguin edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This is after Winston was reading a passage from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, which was contraband in Oceania.
Winston stopped reading for a moment. Somewhere in the remote distance a rocket bomb thundered. The blissful feeling of being alone with the forbidden book, in a room with no telescreen, had not worn off. Solitude and safety were physical sensations, mixed up somehow with the tiredness of his body, the softness of the chair, the touch of the faint breeze from the window that played upon his cheek. The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
Now, quoting Orwell on a weblog, that's not exactly avant-garde. I've done it before (here), and I'm fairly certain I've criticized people in private for quoting Orwell, but that's okay, everybody's a hypocrite. Also, it's a little contradictory that, it being my favourite book, I've only read Nineteen Eight-Four once.
The weblogs I've been reading and enjoying lately don't tell me anything new other than the fact that I'm not unique in my views, which is can be awfully reassuring. Some webloggers write what I am thinking but in a more eloquent or original way, or at least in a more ordered way. They are the products of a mind similar to mine, but less fear-ridden. (TheYeti's NotDating™ series is the best example of this.) The best weblogs are the ones that tell me what I already know.
