Rembrandt, Self-Portrait with Two Circles, 1665

I revive this blog in a state of deep personal crisis. My life has spiralled calamitously downwards, and I now find myself in the simultaneously frightening and exciting position of trying to soften the crash and build once again. I am, to use the familiar phrase, figuring out how I will get back on my feet again.

Up to a point, I want to write about this, possibly because it has therapeutic value for me, possibly because I think it may be of benefit to others, possibly because it is intrinsically interesting. There is not a clear idea in my mind why I want to document it, but then much writing comes from a place of unclear intentions. Writing, like reading, is a process of discovery.

My crisis is not, however, all I want to write about; indeed, I hope to keep it to a minimum. There are subjects and topics far more interesting than myself, even to me. I often reflect that it is unlikely to be coincidental that I am experiencing a personal crisis at the same time as we are all living through profound climate, political, social and cultural crises. And I am not so self-absorbed as to imagine that my own crisis comes remotely close in importance and urgency to these global crises; rather, I regard them as vastly more deserving of my time and attention. So, I wish to write about them, and about other things that interest me, far more than I wish to write about myself.

Nevertheless, we have to begin from somewhere. We live in an age in which the personal and the individual are valued, and hence are valid starting points for inquiries into life and the world around us. The key is to see them as places of departure from which we travel well beyond ourselves, rather than to be content never to escape the boundaries of our private concerns.

The best writing about the self—and, in so far as I will write about myself, the writing that inspires me the most—has always taken the individual as a point from which much broader, more universal thought may develop. I think of Montaigne’s Essays, the Confessions of Augustine and Rousseau, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Or, to take another creative genre, I think of Rembrandt’s magnificent series of self-portraits, works not of self-indulgence but of exploration of what it is to be human, to be alive and to face mortality.

If I could achieve even a fraction of the humanity and artistry of a writer such as Montaigne or an artist such as Rembrandt, then I would regard my life as making, in some small way, a positive contribution to the world.