We learn not for school but for life.

Ah, the written word.

How I love it.

How I crave it. 

My brain drinks the words in.

I remember having flunky post-college jobs where I would be doing some mindless-rote tasks, and I would be bored and seek out intellectual nourishment. I would work as a bartender at the Olive Garden restaurant, for example, and sometimes I would just read the menu because I would need the written word – anywhere I could find it. I’d read rumpled newspapers customers left behind. Anything. 

That was over 30 years ago, but I haven’t changed. I am still curious. Reading is how I learn, and writing is how I process new information. I don’t know what I think, until I take the time and trouble to write it down; I can seek to clarify my thinking, by trying to translate inchoate thoughts into clear intelligible prose. It is never easy. But it is always indispensable.

That is why this blog is so important to me.

It is the opposite of social media, as I see it. Instagram, from what I can tell (not having an account or using it), is all about putting a photogenic face on your life and person to the rest of the world. It is highly unrepresentative visual image of the self – it is like an actor’s headshot. Twitter is worse: it seems to be a tribal forum of ideological combat, designed to provoke outrage, encourage trolling, and spread mean-spiritedness. Facebook is… looking up old friends and acquaintances for older Americans? I have no idea what TikTok or Snapchat social media platforms (so popular nowadays, seemingly) are about, and have little interest in finding out. I am almost 56-years old. Those tech tools were designed for younger people more attuned to short-form video.

But it is all the opposite of this blog, which is an anti-social media platform, I would say. My personal webpage predates the arrival of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and it will be around when it morphs into something entirely different (“Meta,” or whatever). Social media via the Twitter model is all about adopting a pose to the outside world, and getting attention by often being flamboyant and outrageous. It is less about coherent intelligent exposition, and much more about connection and belonging, and posing for the public (ie. headshots). In a society where organized religion has declined and many are isolated and lonely behind their cell phones, social media offers an ersatz community to try to fulfill those needs. It does so very poorly, in my considered opinion. So I have not wanted much to do with it.

So I have stayed with my blog, an antiquated media form.

Do you seen what I mean? Attention and “views” is what social media is about. The highest form of social media is to become an “influencer” on YouTube or Instagram, and to make millions of dollars from sponsors and have millions of followers on your “channel.” In contrast, I have no real audience. I get relatively few visitors. They mostly arrive to my blog, having viewed my other pages, and I am fine with that. Month and after month, year after year, I write mostly for myself. I would write this way even if nobody at all read my missives.

I love the quiet interiority of literature. I love to learn about how people lived and confronted challenges, whether the stories are real (non-fiction) or whether they are lies meant to get at deeper  human truths (fiction). “How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” said Henry David Thoreau. “The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.” So true. How I love that quote!

I love text. Complexity. Nuance. Literature. History. The important questions asked and answered, at least partially. We homo sapiens are a storytelling animal. I love stories. I love languages. This brings me to books. I return to text and music, usually from hundreds of years ago.

Yes, I belong to the Gutenberg press era of words and literacy. I like 19th century novels and classical music by “dead white males” (a reductionist term, if there ever was one – Purcell to Rameau to Bach to Rimsky-Korsakov to Rodrigo to Satie to Copeland – all somehow the same). I read about four books per month (English and Spanish-language novels), and that takes a huge chunk of my time and attention; I can’t read much more than that, and would not want to read less. But I write almost everyday. I need to write. It is an itch which needs to be scratched. If that itch goes unscratched, I get irritated. I grow frustrated. I am not myself.

But à la Marshall McLuhan (“the medium is the message”) we are perhaps leaving the Gutenberg era anchored by print and entered into a new era dominated by emerging audiovisual medias. Increasingly our consciousness swims in a stew of technological distraction, multimedia imagery, and streaming video. Our world is not the old one of newspapers and magazines, and of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens – it is a new world of non-stop YouTube and TikTok videos, and of Xbox video games and Netflix video streaming. The brain wants video quick and entertaining, and grows bored with text and argument. English majors, and the humanities in general, in contrast, are disappearing – becoming archaic, going obsolete. Moving forward the future appears to lie in engineering, bioscience, and coding. It is a world of machines and software, apparently. Artificial Intelligence is the next new industry, or so they say. Machines that can learn will run the world. Is that the future ahead of us? A brave new world?

But the old world of literacy, which has long roots , will not go away. It will just lay dormant. The perceptive, sensitive, and intelligent will always gravitate to the classic texts and written word, because of what it represents about thinking and learning. As George Orwell said, “If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”

But I digress.

I love my blog. I hope to write it until I die. I like flying under the radar. I like my privacy. But the words are the point. I gravitate to the words. That is why I never had much interest in Instagram: focused so much on photos, it seemed like a social media format for (mostly) illiterates.

In contrast, I need the words.

I need the literacy. In my classroom I have this on the wall —

— and this one —

Words to live (and work) by —

Amen.

I have found myself over and over ending my blog postings with, “Amen.” I reflect that over time my blogs take on the aspect of prayers and praying. Good. Martin Luther (or Thomas Merton) would understand. My writings are usually conversations I have with myself on the page (maybe with the Supreme Deity listening in), me attempting to understand my life and the deeper struggles therein. This is not a new literary format. It is a sort of meditation. An introspective looking inward.

Do you see my point? Classic old books, the richness of the past, words and literacy, interiority and complexity, questions that have no facile answer, confusion as an advanced form of understanding – I love it. This is the larger context behind rjgeib.com.

So I need my personal webpage.

I do it for free. I do it not for attention or for money. I do it for free decade after decade. I do it for myself. The thousands of hours – and all the sweat and effort – are totally worth it.

When the Instagram pages and Twitter feeds are done and gone, my webpage will still be up. It was here before, and it will be here after.

I am not here for our cultural moment now – the attention or money or fame today – I am playing the long game. I’m doing this for myself. As I live so I will write, until I die, God help me. The labor is its own reward. The process is the point. Vanquish ego and uplift effort —

“Teach me to care and not to care.”

The eternal Zen of the everlasting now.

Amen.