The Heart of the Matter

When I read Jonathon Delacour’s “Adieu” two nights ago, I was dumbstruck, not that I haven’t been struck “dumb” while reading poetry lately.

My first reaction was a simple “Damn, Jonathon…”

Although I’d been blogging for awhile before Jonathon and Shelley discovered me, I was inspired to improve my writing after Jonathon praised my site. Jonathon helped me to improve my site by moving to Movable Type and by redesigning my template for me. Whenever I had a Movable Type question, he was there with an answer. It’s not that others weren’t willing to help, they were, especially Shelley and Dorothea, but I always asked Jonathon first because he had helped with the original design. I felt a special friendship for Jonathon.

I must admit, though, that I perfectly understand Jonathon’s desire to spend time on something else. It takes an inordinate amount of time to produce an essay a day for a weblog. My pages turned into something quite different, something not nearly as interesting, when I was doing taxes this year. Unless the pages can somehow be derived from your normal work, they become nearly a “full time job.” At the very least, at times it seems like I’m a full-time college student again.

Unfortunately, that understanding doesn’t make Jonathon’s departure any less painful. As noted many times, I’m an INTP and INTP’s are notorious for having, and needing, few friends. Because we have so few friends, though, we miss them doubly when something happens to them.

I’d recently ordered W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo and Rings of Saturn after Jonathon had mentioned Sebald was his favorite author. Part of my recent interest in postmodernism stemmed from my initial glance at them and my realization that they were going to push my understanding of literature.

I was counting on Jonathon’s comments to amplify my discussion of them and push me to a better understanding of Sebald. Does that mean that I won’t have to read them after all, that I can put them in that large stack of “books I want to read when I get the time,” the same stack that I’ve been trying to get through for over a year now when I first realized that I still have books that I bought in college and haven’t gotten around to reading yet? I don’t know.

Still, I wish Jonathon the best while focusing on other projects. But looking at that stack of unread books makes me nearly as sad as knowing that Jonathon won’t be blogging for awhile, if ever.

Jonathon, “the heart of things,” indeed.

3 thoughts on “The Heart of the Matter”

  1. Loren, you may find yourself totally captivated by Sebald’s work, especially if you are interested in the haunting nature of memory, or, to put it more viscerally, in how the world keeps vanishing before our eyes even as we try to hang on to its shards.

    I loved “Rings of Saturn” for its breadth of subject and depth of poetry. In fact, since I read that book, I have purchased all of Sebald’s books, and highly recommed all of them!

    After not writing for a few years, I credit Sebald for reminding me why writing is important … and, since I first heard about Sebald by reading someone’s weblog, it might have been Jonathon who led me to it — though I can’t exactly recall it all now….

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