My first blog entry. Should I be spontaneous, lurid as confessional poets? Or detached like armchair philosophers, betraying no pulse beneath the veneer of words? My fingers tremble before the silver keyboard, like the blind girl in Rilke’s poem “[walking] behind the others, restrained, like one who in a moment will have to sing and before many people.”

“To write is to care about words, about people, about the world, and God.” Anna sent me that quote from St. Scholastica in February 2005. I wrote back: Writing helps me pay attention to the world, and thus experience life more intensely. Without this attention it is easy to trample upon things–to be reckless and relentless especially in the use of technology. Writing, like prayer, allows us that contemplative pause to consider our acts.

Back then, I had just relocated to Houston, and bought myself a little black Moleskine notebook to deal with the sense of loneliness and rootlessness. Thus, began a modest habit of journal-keeping, not daily outpourings by any chance, but still sustained and sustaining, even if it was just copying long passages from books that I wanted to remember. I wrote: These days, more than being a writer, I feel a strong desire to actually be, more and more, like Borges, a perfect reader.

Umberto Eco imagined a humorless Borges: a shrivelled blind man oppressed by a labyrinth of books. I prefer a Borges who delights in meandering the forking paths of the Biblioteca Nacional, and who, like Rilke’s blind girl, would seem to wobble at first, “and yet: as though after crossing-over, she would no longer walk, but fly.”