I am here to confirm the truth of Proverbs 13:12 “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”

Just 5 months ago I was on my way home from Mount Katahdin, Maine, a place I had wanted to be for more than 50 years. Climbing Katahdin was the goal of a long-deferred hope of mine: to hike the Appalachian Trail. I felt that my time this past summer, my months on the Trail, was a personally holy time; that the hike was a pilgrimage taking me to “a tree of life.”

A pilgrimage is usually a long trek to a religious or spiritual shrine of some sort. Katahdin, if it is that for some (it is held sacred by the Maliseet, Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot nations), is not a Christian shrine in the usual sense. It commemorates no saint or martyr, has no church or monument, witnessed no miracle or event in the life of the Church.

For me, this pilgrimage was first of all just a part of my ‘pilgrimage through life’ on my eventual way to heaven. But it was also a pilgrimage within. I spent a lot of time in prayer, reading Scripture, and re-reading the Christian spiritual classics “The Imitation of Christ” and “The Practice of the Presence of God.”

So maybe my time was more of a walking retreat? It doesn’t matter.

Near the end of my time on the Trail another hiker excitedly asked me “So, what’s next?” He had in mind other treks, trips, and experiences, and was happy to share with me where he was headed after he finished the Appalachian Trail. What I replied was something like, “Well, I want to do some reading.”

And my last 5 months have included a lot of reading. A variety of things. Short stories by Flannery O’Connor, and by Leo Tolstoy; silliness by Jasper Fforde and by Douglas Adams; more of the Eastern Orthodox collection of spiritual texts called the ‘Philokalia’; some of Evelyn Underhill’s classic ‘Mysticism’; a Charles Dickens; some William Faulkner; and more. All tied together only by the fact that I had never read those works before. And if that is my selection criterion, I have a long way to go.

This leads by a winding path to something I’ve been thinking about since I got back from Katahdin: There are already way too many words floating around out here.

There are already words in books, words in articles, words in blog posts, words in conversations, words in arguments, words on the Internet, words on paper, words in broadcasts and podcasts, and more. Some days it seems that everybody is either talking or typing, and that almost everybody is publishing in some form or another. All of greatly varying quality.

And now I have just added more and published more. Mea culpa.

I actually feel like there is nothing I can say or write that is either new or interesting or of great quality.

So this blog, for now, will just let people peer into my commonplace book. I’ve already been doing that sporadically. Now I want to be more regular about it, to copy out notes from things I have been reading, and to offer my brief comments (so, yes, sorry, I will be adding yet more words to the world).

If there’s one thing I learned during my career in libraries, it is that there really are “too many books, too little time” because “of the making of books there is no end” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). At best, these notes will lead you to find and read the full texts from which the snippets come. Do read some of those old texts. They’re better anyway.