Blogging friends had warned me that my early enthusiasms would wane. “You’ll stop writing one day,” they said. “There are more addresses out there than there are bloggers.” Ghost writers, or perhaps Zombie sites.

And they were right. Consulting projects and teaching assignments claimed my attention. Until, one day, last week, it occurred to me that I’d not written in a long time and was not sure why. The problem was, how to begin again?

Tonight, I logged on. I’ve been reading Paul Valery’s reflections on European politics from the late 19th Century to  the late 1920’s; and I was struck by a quote that might have come from last week’s Financial Times about the unanticipated effects of an interconnected globalizing planet:

“Henceforward every action will be re-echoed by many unforeseen interests on all sides; it will produce a chain of immediate events- confused reverberations in a closed space. The effect of effects, which were formerly imperceptible or negligible in relation to the length of a human life and to the radius of action of any human power, are now felt almost instantly at any distance; they return immediately to their causes, and only die away in the unpredictable. The expectations of the predictor are always disappointed, and that in a matter of months or a very few years.” (Valery, 1931, Forward for “Regards sur le monde actuel”)

Sounds like something written by the Bank of England last year, on the rationality of profit maximization by individual banks resulting in the destabilization of the banking system. Or the effects of German internal politics on Greek debt; or spiking Eurolibor because banks in one country don’t trust the viability of banks in another. Or last Friday’s 300 point drop in the Dow because the 400,000 spike in US job growth was mostly in part-time census workers (more on that next time).

The wheel continues to spin faster and faster: but Valery reminds us, we’re just in a later moment of modern times.

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