Senecio Greyii Brachyglottis - Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' 25 October 2024

I told an Argentine lieutenant commander, “I absolutely refuse to obey your order.” His answer, “In time of war I could have you shot or I would send you to the Argentine Antarctic and the only women you would meet would be penguins. But I will do you two favours. One, I will have you arrested and you will spend a week in the navy brig next door. Two, I will advise you that you go now to a bookstore and buy some books. You will have time to read them.”

I went to Pigmalion on Calle Corrientes. It sold books in every language except Spanish. My parents bought their books there in English as well as Jorge Luís Borges.

When I arrived I found two books. One was Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld. The other was The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. While there there, I spotted an older man with poor vision. Because I was an ignorant conscript it was only months later that I figured that the man was Jorge Luís Borges.

 Markings were intimate notes that were found inside Hammarskjöld’s desk after he died.

 When I started by Blogger blog in 2006, ancillary to my web page in 2006, I saw it as a “Dear Diary”.  Joan Didion in an interview with the New York Times said this: 

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

This means that I write for myself even though I post links to my blog in several social media sites. It is irrelevant what people opine or if they limit themselves to emojis.

These last four years, after my wife died on 9 December 2020 many of my blogs have relevance to what I feel by my loss. I have no concern when people come up to me and say, “Alex why do you keep writing that depressing stuff?”

 As I get older the idea of worrying about my legacy has become unimportant except for my blog. While I am certainly no Hammarskjöld my blog is my “Dear Diary” on an internet-cloud desk.

I worry about how to preserve it.