Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Portrait of a Blogger
W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (1975; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 198:
Newer› ‹Older
This temptation to act a role, and in the process to shock the complacent, is partly the simple willingness of most people to live up to the picture others have of us, provided it does not demand too much effort, and even at times, if our spirits are high, to offer them a self-caricature. But it also involves something else in Johnson, which goes much deeper and which we can only call "self-burlesque": a self-burlesque in which so much of what we find ourselves defending or disputing with such heat is, against the cosmic backdrop, seen as trivial, and as little more than doomed posturings and gestures.Si parva licet componere magnis, I see self-caricature and even self-burlesque in my blogging persona at times.
