Gonzalo Barr

I think it was one of the characters in Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls who says, “I’m an Ecclesiastes kind of guy,” as a shorthand way of relating how he looks at the world.  The line was meant to be smart.  I thought it was.  Otherwise, I would not remember it almost fourteen years after I read the novel.  Like all really good lines, it left me thinking.  Then I got up from the sofa where I had been reading and I found my copy of the King James Bible and, once again, read Ecclesiastes.

You can mine several messages from that book of the Hebrew bible – “There is a time for everything” is one.  A musical group in the sixties recorded an especially saccharine tune to accompany the words.  The tune earned a spot in the hit parade.  When the Catholic clergy tried to gain favor with the youth of the day by substituting a proper pipe organ and choir with a semi-circle of folksy guitars, the hit enjoyed an afterlife of sorts.  This was about the same time that the term “nominal Catholic” appeared, though I am not at all suggesting that there was a cause-and-effect.

Another meaning you can mine from this book is that everything comes to an end.  “All is vanity” is how it appears in the King James Bible.  I’m curious to know the meaning and tenor of the original Hebrew word.  I am also curious to know why the translators chose “vanity” to translate it, even as I appreciate that it was a sublime choice.  The word still carries a sense of “futility” and “ostentatious display.”

Maybe it is too severe a judgment to say that all writing that aspires to publication is to some degree vain.  The justification for most published writing is that, good or bad, someone eventually reads it.  That is not the case with a blog.

My website launched in August 2006 to accompany the publication of my first book, The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa.  Since then, I have been thinking about keeping a blog.  Don’t ask me why I want to add one more blog to the 60 million other blogs already in existence.  I have no idea why.  I could plea insanity, but it would be more honest of me to admit that the driving force behind this experiment is plain vanity — the inkling that someone out there will take a few minutes to read a post, the hope that they will return to read another.

So here goes:  I have no agenda, no topics that I want to discuss specifically, except literature.  I have no idea what I am doing either.   But I hope that by doing it I will entertain the occasional reader who, brought here by chance or by the digital currents of search engines, will visit with me.