This is my first blog entry, and, of course, I want to make a good impression and draw readers into a conversation on the important, and sometimes the trivial, issues of our day. I realize that starting off with a Latin title could seem just the tiniest bit pretentious and off-putting, but I am going to trust you to stick with me till the end when I explain why Scribo Ergo Sum, “I write, therefore I am,” is true for me.

I wanted to entitle this first piece “I blog, therefore I am,” but “blog” is a little tough to render in Latin. Web is pretty easy; a spider’s web is Aranea. Log however presents several possibilities. One sense of log is rooted in the word logic. Frankly, in reading some web logs, logic is not the first word that springs to mind. The other root is related to tree. This seems to be the real source of logs in the context of Captain’s logs. Because such logs consist of small and concise entries, their Latin word is Codicilli. Yes, like the codicil to a will. It is, literally, a small branch. I like the idea that the sound cilli (silly) is part of all this. So welcome to my first Aranea Codicilli

I have been writing most of my life. Starting in cuneiform in clay, then moving on to Hebrew on vellum, eventually in English with quill dipped in ink; progressing to fountain pens and typewriters on paper, I now find myself plying my trade with electrons on the web.

When I began writing, I got some very standard advice: Write what you know. I have spent my life not following that Polonius-like piece of common wisdom. This little motto didn’t really help me because when I was young, I thought I knew everything. Thus the entire world seemed to fit nicely into my area of expertise. Not knowing the encyclopedic scope of my ignorance, in an abundance of chutzpah, I wrote about everything.

I still write about everything, but now my youthful certainties have been tempered by some humility and a sense of the full scope of my ignorance. Ignorance is not, in my view, a failing, only a condition that, unlike stupidity, can be remedied by knowledge.

In my youth, I wrote about what I did not know, not knowing that I did not know. Today I write about what I do not know but what I want to learn about. I write to try to bring a semblance of order out of the chaos of our world. I write to organize my own inchoate emotions and tame my anxieties.

I have come to learn that my essential aim is not to demonstrate technical expertise or specialized knowledge. What I offer is great curiosity about our world, our selves and how we can learn to appreciate each other and communicate across a wide spectrum of ideas with tolerance, understanding and humor.