Some years ago, after I had begun to learn the rudiments of English Country dance, and begun to lead the dances myself, I began to keep a notebook. In this notebook, I allowed myself to place anything at all I deemed useful or suitable, without anxiety or self-consciousness, no Muse or editor leaning on my shoulder to see what I had written there--a kind of Lichtenbergian "waste-book," in which programs, dances, notes, and observations jostled for space together. Others may see it, and have often seen it, but the notebook serves only me: it is the continuing register of my experience as a dance-leader.
So with this notebook in electronic form. It would be disingenous to write, and then to publish, anything that has a place on the World Wide Web with the pretense that it is a private communication of the soul to itself--what is the point of publication, after all, but to be read? still, it is a kind of waste-record of my life and observations that I allow the world to overhear.
By way of preliminaries:
*Night Thoughts* was the title of a book-length poem by the 18th-century divine Edward Young. Immensely popular in its day, even with its rather heterodox theology, it would have sunk without a trace by the twentieth century but for two things. William Blake, for a deluxe late-18th-century edition of the poem, created a series of illustrations, typically alternating the brooding and the ecstatic: these, with the revival of Blake's reputation, have long since outpaced poor Young's poem. Plus, in the 1850s, George Eliot wrote a perceptive, sensitive long essay on Young, perhaps her finest non-fiction writing.
So much for Young. I do not embrace his theology or Blake's illustrations of it--I purloin his title as convenient for a kind of nocturnal diary, written by night, not the first inspirations of the dawn but the retrospections of the sunset and after.
I will not disguise my life in these pages, but I will try to protect my friends, who have not given permission for the publication of their lives. You may find yourself in these *Thoughts*, but nameless or obscured.
Why write these lines at all? why, in an era of information at flood-tide, amid a noise of endless chinwaggery, should I add my voice? I could scarcely make a claim to distinctiveness--anything that is human is unlikely to be unique--nor would I be so grandiose as to claim to speak for my kind or my generation or my country. All I know is that as I write for myself, I speak for myself also--that, at least, I am sure no-one else can manage.
