Before the fact: Walter Benjamin on blogging

Today's brief offering transcribes another scrawled entry in my notebook, which records more of Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street (which had its own origins in barely-legible notes).  In the context of the year-and-decade-end inbox avalanche of advice on how to optimize, maximize and monetize one's blog, this comes, to me at least, as sweet relief and bracing reminder.

"Standard Clock"

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives.  For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them.  For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor.  Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.  "Genius is application." 

(Selected Writings, vol. 1, 446)