The sister blog of this one – A Medical Education – has become something different to what I originally intended. As well as an archive and gathering place for my more purely (sorta) medical writing, I have used it to ruminate on various meetings I have gone to for instance this and this and this. What readership either blog has garnered has come from this source
I always intended this blog to be the main archive for my writing. I have learnt some interesting things. In the past I wrote a lot about sport (I haven’t collected any of those pieces yet), especially association football. And I wrote relatively little about the natural world, this being the only exception. At this point in my life this is an exact inversion of my relative interests in the two fields.
Secondly, in the past I wrote a lot more experimental prose than I thought – like this and this and this . This was a side of my writing I had nearly forgotten and somewhat denigrated.
In general, I am not that sure if I have found a common thread on this blog, somewhat like the one that (sorta) defined A Medical Education. But I am finding there are aspects of my prior writing I am happy with, happier with than I suspected.
I also intend to use this blog as a sort of thematic commonplace book. I have a clinical, literary, philosophical and personal interest in sleep. Sleep is a human universal (with very rare exceptions) the purpose of which is imperfectly understood. We all journey into what a Jewish tradition called “one sixtieth of death”, and what happens when we sleep is inaccessible to us as a direct experience. I intend post excerpts from literature about sleep and the literature of sleep as they come to me.
Séamus Sweeney 