in search of meaning (and summer)

the last ten days can be accounted for as follows: packing, moving, unpacking, re-packing, traveling, traveling & traveling. it has to be said that my honorable intentions to maintain & update this blog on a regular basis have thus far fallen short. thankfully i came across the following passage whilst reading Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (incidentally an enjoyable, if at times narrow-minded, account of the authors travels aboard the steamer Quaker City in 1867 which set sail from New York en route to the Azores and onward to the Western Mediterranean, Holy Land & North Africa in what was the first cruise of it's kind and subsequently the first great American travel book) and it succeeded in quieting the guilt:

"after prayers the synagogue took the semblance of a writing-school.  the like of that picture was never seen in a ship before.  behind the long dining-tables on either side of the saloon, and scattered from one end to the other of the latter, some twenty or thirty gentlemen and ladies sat them down under the swaying lamps, and for two or three hours wrote diligently in their journals.  alas! that journals so voluminously begun should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion as most of them did!  i doubt if there is a single pilgrim of all that host but can show a hundred fair pages of journal concerning the first twenty days' voyaging in the Quaker City; and i am morally certain that not ten of the party can show twenty pages of journal for the succeeding twenty thousand miles of voyaging!  at certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest.  but if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty's sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat."