There are very few things the human mind can encompass that have no beginning or end. Eternity, perhaps the transcendent and numinous, perhaps love. Even then, there is more mystery than comprehension.

But blogs are not eternal; indeed, they are the most mortal of the mortal, the mayflies of the internet. There is the inevitable first post, and just as inevitably, there is a last post. And since 95% of all blogs are abandoned, there are a lot of last posts. I imagine more blogs end with a whimper than with a bang, just trailing off.

What makes this blog different? Its purpose is to be an online commonplace book, wunderkammer, and a home for the occasional essay. And I’ve been doing these things for years, just offline. Now they are transferred online.

How successful in fulfilling these purposes will this blog be? How long-lasting? That gets us back to the title quotation, “At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear,” taken from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Everything looks good when you first start, but sags with entropy and finally collapses into a bag of skin on the floor.

It all depends on whether I take that extra step to post the quotations and wonders I encounter. I readily admit it’s much easier to do so in my database program. So if this blog peters out, it will be due to laziness or the effects at attempted multitasking of a brain built for one task at a time.