Initia Nova, New Beginnings 2025

I has been nearly a decade since my old college self, with full confidence in my heart, posted on this small blog. It was like shouting deep into the void of the internet, and quite soon, I gave up on a small dream that I had long held close within my heart, namely, that I might share with the world my love of all things historical, linguistic, and worth thinking about. I was in college, studying history and religion at Brooklyn College deep within the beating heart of NYC; indeed, I felt I was swimming in an ocean of historical reminisces that were tantalizingly intoxicating, I would loiter amid my living room, late past midnight, and my mind would saunter through the ages and adventures of the past. Over time, I had a (perhaps foolish) idea, why not try, in some way however futile, to capture in some sense the tenebrous yet effervescent feelings I felt about those years in which I never walked, yes, this was an idea! But how to do it?

               One autumn afternoon, sipping a Dunkin’ Donut’s pumpkin spice latte (very NYC of me, I know!), and walking to class down Bedford Avenue, I had an idea, why not write a novel of the era which had heretofore captured me in such a way that I felt, like Claire Randolph in Outlander, that I had one foot stuck unwillingly in the present, another most zealously seeking a footing in a ghostly era long lost to time in which I could never walk, yet nevertheless yearned to breath and see for myself? Now that was an idea, and so I wrote, and wrote, and made this small blog with the hope that one day, I might share those effervescent, ghostly, impossible feelings and yearnings with the world, in small bite sized chunks, seeking to share my midnight lucubrations with kindred souls.

               That was in 2018, in some ways, a different world in itself before many things; In the interval, I graduated, had children, travelled, taught world history in NYC charter schools, experienced the COVID19 pandemic in this monstrous metropolis; yet now I find myself once again lost in reveries on the 18^th century, on the hallowed monastic cloisters of the Middle Ages, on a vision of a sea swept shore of Alexandria when the Apostles roamed the Mediterranean…and I once again want to pick up my old idea, of writing. I have already written near 300 pages of a nebulous and convoluted novel situated in the years 1765-1776, set in three principle cities in British North America, and inhabited with three POV characters all showing different perspectives of life in the Colonial Period, yet this blog post is not the place to describe it. Needless to say, I once again venture on this small blog, with the small hope that by sharing my love of the past, I might one day share my attempt at capturing a sense of the age which has captivated me for over a decade, that I might transmit in some way the shadowy echoes of a world that we can never visit, that is both closer than we realize, yet galaxies away from us, a world foreign and different, yet eerily similar to our own.

               If this has in any way inspired you to see what that novel might be, or if you seek just to join me in my midnight meditations, join me, for here in this humble blog, I offer you, my dear and officious reader, meditations upon the past, upon the Latin language, and eventually I will begin offering snippets of my doggerel fiction.

               In the meantime, I am as always your most obedient and humble servant,

C.B.

Williamsburg, Viriginia, at night looking to the Capitol Building, taken by me in 2025. This hallowed site of 18th century history has long inspired my midnight meditations, and is one of the three principle cities in which my novel occurs.