#500

It's really hard to believe. After more than a quarter million words, I've come to my 500th post. If I were a champagne drinker, I supposed I'd be popping corks.

Blogs aren't all I write, but blogging does take up a good portion of my time. I've poured a lot of words into academic containers, I can assure you, for it seems that higher education is unthinkable without text. What I learned over there was that we have established a lot of fact, we have described a lot of phenomena, and we know one helluva lot these days. But what I've realized that in spite of all that, we're really not all that smarter -- as a species, that is -- and we're certainly not any wiser for it.

Writing aficionados will tell you that you need to write a million words. Well, just over five years, just over 250,000 words ... you can do the math. Who's says I'll even live long enough to know whether I found it or not. At least in the blogging world, that is. But, maybe it's not a hard-and-fast rule.

Yes, the 500th blog post. There was a time when numbers were thought to mean something. (Oh, we still think that they do in some areas: like business where as long as the last one is bigger than the previous one we think we should be happy; or if you're the millionth customer somewhere. Funny: the bigger the number the better, but it hasn't always been so. There was a time when small was beautiful: one world; a happily married couple; for Christians, the Trinity; the four corners of the earth; the seven wonders of the world ... OK, so some numbers were left out. We moderns all know that was all meaningless nonsense anyway.No, I'm not going to make a case that gematria or number mysticism is "true", but it is a way to get off dead center and maybe see things in a slightly different light.

Take the number 5, for example. Traditionally, this was the number of change. After all, it was at the midway point between 0 and 9. The mystic Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin thought it was an evil number, and I suppose it is, if change isn't one of your favorite things. And 500? Well, that's two orders of magnitude greater (5*10= 50, or one order of magnitude; 50*10=500, the second order). If one order of magnitude is a kicker (for example, four may be a foundation, but think of 40 years in the desert, or 40 days of fasting, or 40 days of rain ... those familiar Bible texts start to look a bit different, I must say), then what's two? If 10-times is a spiritualization, then 100-times starts looking cosmic. Right. And that's kind of how I feel right now?

Stated somewhat differently, it would appear that my 500th blog post should mark some kind of fundamental change. And maybe that's where I am. To be perfectly honest, in all that I have written here over the past five-plus years, I've done everything I could to be clear but civil, to be controversial but considerate. And now, perhaps, it's time for a change. Why not?

It would seem, dear Reader, that now is simply a propitious opportunity to vary the presentation, to alter the approach, to step up to the plate, to ... well, you get the point. But, perhaps it's time to simply up the intensity. Now, that's a thought ...