10 Years on the Blog! Upon the sea of time can we not ever drop anchor for one day?

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Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at the Window, 1822

Today marks the 10th anniversary of Byron’s Muse. When I started this blog I certainly could not have imagined that I would be writing it ten years down the road, nor could I imagine how it would develop or how even my personal life could develop. It is bittersweet to think of ten years passing by, just like in the poem “The Lake” by the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine I wonder can we not drop anchor upon the sea of time for one day? This blog is deeply entwined with my personal life and thus this is a time of self-reflection as well for me. What fruits has my artistic labour borne in these ten long years? Who knows. At times I feel I have accomplished, and that I am still accomplishing, what I had wanted regarding my writing, and at times I feel it all means nothing at all. I have gone through various moods and feelings regarding my writing in all these years, from feeling like I have a clear vision and a mission, to feeling like it makes no difference at all. If there is something that I have accomplished, then it is the creation of my own world, in a way that Anais Nin writes: “I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.” No matter the turbulence of the seas of my private life, this blog has always been a safe harbour, a place where I could anchor my boat until I regained strength for another sail. Broken and beaten by life I escape into aesthetics. And yet, the more I write about art the more I feel that I know nothing about it. I am frighteningly aware of how little I know of it and I wonder will I ever know enough to feel confidence about it. Caspar David Friedrich’s painting seems fitting at this ocassion as I am feeling more than a little melancholy and also the woman in the painting is shown looking out the window, looking out into the world and observing it but not being in it, and this image chimes with me well; the clouds are slowly gliding in the sky, autumn leaves are falling, the last songs of the birds are dying in the treetops, what awaits me?…  To end, verses from Lamartine’s “The Lake”:

(The Lake – Alphonse de Lamartine, translated by A.Z.Foreman)