A young poet once said to Mallarmé, "I had the most marvellous idea for a poem this afternoon." "Oh dear," said Mallarmé, "what a pity." "What do you mean?" said the young poet, stung. "Well," said Mallarmé, "poems aren't made of ideas, are they? They're made of words."
Stephen Fry, The Hippopotamus
Though an apocryphal tale, it is nonetheless useful in understanding the challenges of blogging, particularly on as regular a basis as 100daystooffload.com.
Today I the most marvellous idea for a blog: 'the importance of historical analogy.' Marvellous because historical analogies are important. Problematic, because the 100 days challenge can fall foul of the writing taking too long, and the labour becoming too much to maintain. In the case of historical analogies, it is hard to keep it short while covering all the constituent points. So this topic will have to wait for another today.
As Mark Twain is claimed to have observed:
I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one
Or in my case, I didn't have the time to write you a short blog about historical analogies, so I wrote about something else.
Good night, and good luck.
Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash
This post is day 019 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. If you want to get involved, you can get more info from 100daystooffload.com.
