You must be as anxious as I am to read more about sewcrates.com’s purpose. As I’m sure you’ve discovered by reading my contradictory purpose pronouncements, the purpose evolves with my many mood swing. I doubt I’ll ever come up with a definitive purpose, but as I search, I will share all my advances and missteps. All for your entertainment, of course.

I’ve been told that the best part of my website is watching me fail. Chuck summed it up best with a comment about my discussion on meanness: “While I applaud your efforts at being mean, I think it is far more humorous to watch you try to be mean and fail.” Doolies chimed in as well: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Today’s purpose is brought to you by the letter “S.”

I am forever inspired by how others write. A weakness of those who can’t: they study and aspire to understand those who can. Since I’m almost finished with The Da Vinci Code (finally), I drove to Borders (like most hyperlinks, this one is completely and utterly gratuitous (kind of like the words “completely and utterly” (notice the embedded parenthetical))—nobody will ever click it, and if they did, they’d ask themselves, why the hell did he link that? if I wanted to buy a book, I would have went to a book site and not read his crappy musing), and while browsing the bookshelves, I came across the journal of Albert Camus.

I glanced through the book and found inspiration. The publication of the journal is a precursor to the blog. Camus’s journal catalogued his everyday ideas and philosophies. He jotted down lines of dialogue, descriptions, synopses, or anything that struck is fancy. Some of this writing ended up in his novels as transcriptions or themes. His journal was his memory. He wrote sporadically. Some days he would write pages, other days a few lines, and sometimes months would pass with no entries.

While it is not clear whether he thought about publishing the journal when he wrote it, he did make the decision to publish it after he had found success as a writer. He typed his notes and edited the journal for publication. What I liked about the journal was that the audience was himself. He sometimes recorded cryptic notes with no introduction or conclusion. He was not trying to entertain with his journal, he was trying to document his thoughts for use at a later date.

I didn’t end up spending the seventeen dollars to buy the book, mostly because while the format interested me, the ideas were of less interest. They are Camus’ ideas, not mine. The format inspired me to not worry so much about completing my thoughts or musings. I posted my last two musings (April 15, 2004 and April 11, 2004). Both contained snippets of information. They were not complete, and they lacked a theme and polish. I will try to worry less about that. The polish will come later, when I use the musings for something discrete. For now, I’ll post my thoughts in whatever form or idiocy they come in. The following is the first step:

notes on responsibility

People try to avoid accepting responsibility, especially for negative activities. The afterward for The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is an example. The book itself is an interesting history of how Hitler and his men doomed the world to a world war and some of the worst atrocities of the century. The author, William Shirer, was an American journalist covering Germany during the rise of Nazism. In the afterward, he discusses how the public reacted to his book—mostly positive, with some negative comments from the academic historians who didn’t think a journalist using his experiences and the Third Reich’s documents should write a history book (it seems, for them, history should only be told by history professors. I guess they fear a non-historian might make it interesting).

The not-so-surprising discussion in the afterward was how the German people reacted to his book. It was well received in most of the world. The German critics and people did not enjoy the book. Mr. Shirer attributes this bad reception to his belief that the German people have not accepted their role in what happened during Nazism. I’ve read and heard this before.

I didn’t want to discuss whether this is true or not. I do not know enough about the German people to get into that debate. I will assume there is some truth to it because it helps support my thesis: people hate negative history. They will avoid looking at the past if they know they made a mistake. An article I read discussed a study of car buyers. After buying their car, the buyers would read everything about their new car. They would not, however, read anything about other cars that they thought about buying. Like the German people, the buyers did not want to know or be reminded of any mistake.

This is probably why we never learn from our mistakes.