CONTEMPLATING THE INFINITE
photo of letterforms used in letterpress printing.

By Way of Introduction: What’s In A Name?

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The idea of launching a weblog has been swirling around my thoughts for the better part of two years.

As my interests are rather broad, and lacking the desire or discipline to confine my musings to a single topic area, I have struggled with identifying a unifying theme; a general rubric under which I could write about a diverse range of subjects yet retain a sense of connection, a sense of interrelatedness as opposed to disparity. Given certain life changes I’ve undergone in the past year, it occurred to me I was in the midst of a what I would call a self-reclamation project and immediately seized upon the idea of naming this blog “Reclamation.” Unfortunately, every variation of an appropriate URL based on “reclamation” was unavailable.

I was about to step away from this project altogether when inspiration struck: I’d been re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More, a history of infinity (primarily in the context of its development and explication in mathematics) and the notion of contemplating the infinite had certainly flitted around my consciousness at some point. However, the “aha” moment came when I remembered a favorite passage from P.G. Wodehouse:

“We all shook hands, and the policeman, having retrieved a piece of chewing-gum from the underside of a chair, where he had parked it for a rainy day, went off into a corner and began to contemplate the infinite.” (from Jeeves and the Chump Cyril)

Hence, a blog was born.

While I intend my writing here to be serious, in-depth and composed for a sophisticated reading audience, when I “contemplate the infinite” I seek to retain a Wodehouseian sense of unpretentiousness and humor.


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