The recent failure of our server’s hard drive has forced us to reconstruct the PeaceDocs site, one page at a time, copying and pasting, from our archival files. Among these were the entries from the PeaceDocs Blog, going back two years to October 29, 2007. In that first entry, on the film Across the Universe, we set out to record our immediate impressions of that movie and what it, and the 1960s, meant to the work and history of peacemaking. The entry was supposed to be that way: immediate and impressionistic. That’s what blogs are all about. All in all we posted only about two dozen entries over that two years: about one a month. Hardly a real blogger’s pace.
But as we continued to write, the entries to our Blog began to take on a much more formal quality. We began to limit ourselves to 750 words, and most of the entries were far from immediate responses, but became reflective — and often introverted and searching — essays on the broader issues involved in the arts, food, the economy, religion and politics.
We soon began to realize that “Blog” might not be the best term for what we were doing. Most blogs, from what we can see, tend to be quick-reaction vehicles, keyed to the events of the day, firm and timely expressions of opinion. And so we became uncomfortable with the form and its demands for a journalistic approach to writing. Not that we have anything against journalism, but with so much to cover in the historical and contemporary traditions of peacemaking, we did not feel that the blog form met our needs. Nor did the entries we were writing fit the blog format’s requirements. Many weeks could go by without an entry, and the PeaceDocs Blog began to look forlorn.
The crash of the PeaceDocs site offered an opportunity — in the midst of all the reconstruction work going on elsewhere on the files — to decide whether or not to keep the Blog and its entries. After reviewing the essays and the topics they covered, we’ve decided that, yes, we should keep them on the site. The writing’s not bad. They stay within their word limits. Collectively they do constitute a record of reflections on a great variety of peace topics and themes not readily framed by the structure of the site’s more historical, religious and political categories. But the blog format, and its expectations of immediate response and almost daily upkeep, would have to go.
We’ve therefore renamed this section of the site after what it really is: “Essays.” For most scholars the non-research essay is no longer of much value. Between the hefty monograph dominated by theory or backed up by archival data, and the journal article, a miniature of the monograph but with more of the self-consciousness of new discovery, most humanists don’t have time or need for what used to be the very core of humanist writing. In between their great editions of the classics or their scriptural and reform writing, the great humanist essayists — Petrarch (in his letters), Erasmus, Montaigne or Pascal — set out to present great themes, to treat them in an essentially discursive form where their command of language and rhetorical device could best highlight the essential themes of civic, intellectual and spiritual life that they set out to treat.
The essay became a key form of humanist writing and has remained so today in more popular, less scholarly forms, as readers of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books will recognize. The “essay” is what its French meaning indicates: an “attempt” to get at the truth or understanding of some issue. As we looked over the entries to our Blog we realized that, good or bad, successful or not, they were mainly only attempts to come to grips with some pressing issue of peace and justice.
We’ve tried to avoid the blog’s tendency to declarative certainty, but any essay will, of course, reflect the writer’s opinions of the moment and concerns of the day, whether or not one reflects on an idea or concern for an hour, an afternoon or a month. But the essay does allow the writer to stay true to a more reflective form and tone, to more slowly and carefully try to get at a truth that’s there but not so apparent, not so accepted; and all this seems appropriate to a site that tries to delve into the deeper meanings of peace and peacemaking.
