The last post on August 5 turned out to be the 1,100th on this site. One thousand one hundred.  That number is too large for me to "wrap my brain around" but I did wrap my brain around each of those 1,100 posts, or at least 75% of them. Probably 25% were written by others. At about post #950 I began thinking about writing about this at #1000 but I couldn't wrap my brain around that either.Public Occurrences has been a part of my life longer than one of my wives and all of my girlfriends. There's a sense of desolation in that.

I'm embarrassed.  I've thought about why I'm embarrassed and I think it has to do with the obsessive-compulsive part of my personality.  I used to watch college tackle football on TV for twelve straight hours on Saturdays.  Then I had a moment of clarity, and stopped watching TV entirely.  I haven't watched twelve hours of football or anything else on TV in eight years, much less twelve straight hours.

The idea of starting a blog came into my head when I read an article by Andrew Sullivan that I had seen previewed on Dennis Dutton's incomparable Arts & Letters Daily. "Blog?"  I had never heard of a blog. It sounded like a curse word.  Mr. Sullivan had just started a blog his own self and was rapturous about it. Thus 1,100 posts. I loved my blog too at first.  It was like a message in a bottle tossed into the cyber ocean, and Message in a Bottle was the alternative title I had chosen for the blog.


The Medium is the Message, Marshall McLuhan taught us, and the blog medium is often analogized to a diary, but with the critical distinction that a blog is public, which makes it not a diary, which is private, at all.  The public nature of the blog had an immediate impact on me. Just the one in a kazillion chance that someone else would read my message in a bottle made me more careful in writing. I read more, researched, and gave more thought--it may not seem that way!--to what I wrote than I would have in a diary, or in the semi-private, semi-public medium of email.

Somewhere on Public Occurrences is a quote from John Bunyan, something to the effect of, "I have written what I intended to write."  That was it.  I thought about a topic, decided to write about it, read and researched it, and then wrote what I intended to write. And was Done. I found out that that process was hard, writing was hard. I don't know and don't want to know how many hours those 1,100 posts represent. I remember thinking about that briefly, but then banishing the thought, when I finished the July 31 post on religion.  The time posted is listed as 9:41 a.m.  That's a false lie. That's the time I posted the first part of that post. I began work on it a little after 8 a.m.  By the time I finally got Done adding on and adding on, it was after 9 p.m., but the post time remained the same. So I have replaced twelve straight hours of watching college tackle football with twelve straight hours of writing on a blog. That does not constitute "personal growth."

I have made friends through this blog, and that has been rewarding. I am more knowledgeable, and that is its own reward, and a few people have made it part of their routine to pick my bottles out of the ocean and read the messages therein contained, and that touches me and flatters me.  "The name 'Benjamin Harris' is well-known in China," Professor Xu Weixin said in greeting in Beijing in November, 2008.  That was very touching and very flattering and among certain groups in China the name is known.  But not as well-known as the name Xu Weixin is in America, and around the world.

The impact that I have made has been non-existent, which makes John Bunyan's quote all the more important as justification for the effort. When Woody Allen turned 75 he said that there was no wisdom that came with age.  So I have learned. I am certainly more knowledgeable than I was eight years ago, but I'm no wiser.

It is a very Western way of thinking to want to justify one's efforts in some way. We crave "meaning."  I don't think there is meaning to our lives as that is...meant.  Let me not involve you in that thought: I do not think that there is meaning like that to my life. I do not believe in a God as I was taught to believe in my Presbyterian household.  I don't think I was put on earth for some purpose which He may or may not reveal to me and which I may or may not fulfill. I exist; at one point I didn't and at another point I won't.

The only meaning I find in my life is effort. I think I should try. For several years I have had this medallion by Josue Dupon on my desk at work:

                                                                  
It's called "L'Effort." A man struggles to move a boulder with a staff. Why the man is doing that is not contained in Dupon's artwork. Because it doesn't matter, the man's trying.

The only thing I have done over eight years and 1,100 posts is make l'effort.  Has it been worth it, which is a different take on the meaning of effort?  In other words, would I do it again?  No. At the moment I write this on this Friday afternoon, which, when I began, was Friday morning, it has not been worth it.  It has been too draining. The Seeking the Soul of China posts of the last two weeks have been too tiring physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Sometimes there's a turning point in one's life and one doesn't realize it at the time. So it was for me that happy, carefree, boozy evening in March, 2006 when my then girlfriend and I began discussing where we'd go on our first big trip together and, chemical reactions being unpredictable, I suggested and we decided: China. I remember we also discussed South Africa.  What if we'd gone to South Africa?

China interacted with my peculiar body chemistry to trigger a constellation of behaviors recognized as Obsessive-Compulsive Personality."  It is not that I want to know about "swap child, make food" as much as I need to know about "swap child, make food," as other obsessive-compulsives (like Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets) need to wash their hands fifty times a day. It is not healthy to do either; the hands get chapped in the one instance, the brain gets fried in the other. Such is the condition of my brain, and my soul, at this time, and for the past two weeks. And I haven't even gotten to the hard part yet: what are the things, deep in China's soul, of which behavior like "swap child, make food," are "merely" manifestations?  When I started seeking the soul of China last fall I thought, hoped, and wrote, that maybe this was about seeking my own soul too. If I find my own soul maybe the effort will have been worth it. Or maybe not. I'll try, but only because I have to.  I am Benjamin Harris.

Image: Kafka.