Reconsiderations

Toward the end of his life, St Augustine began a project called in Latin the Retractationes. Often mistranslated as "retractions," the title actually is closer in meaning to "reconsiderations" or "revisions," because, in its two parts, Augustine looks back on his extensive writings and comments on the ways in which he'd erred, was unclear, or had otherwise failed to get his point across to the reader. Often, this was due to his excessive use of rhetoric in the heat of a theological dispute, of which he had taken part in many. Consequently, the Retractationes is an important document in better understanding what Augustine actually thought rather than what others mistakenly understood him to be thinking.

I was reminded of the Retractationes during my recent trip. Eight and a half hours in a plane each way gives a man a lot of time to kill and I did so by rereading Peter Brown's 1967 biography of Augustine. While Brown doesn't devote many pages to the Retractationes, his discussion of them nevertheless sparked a thought in my own head: what if, as I wind down Grognardia as a regularly updated blog, I revisit some of my own posts with an eye toward better explaining myself? Like Augustine, many of my most widely read and discussed posts, are tinged with overheated rhetoric that gives a false – or at least skewed – impression of what I actually think about a number of topic important to roleplaying games and their history.

In some cases, even my original posts had elements of self-explanation, because I've always been keenly aware of just how fraught conversation by blog can be. The written word is obviously great. However, it often lacks the nuance provided by verbal intonation, facial expressions, and other aspects of embodied speech, any one of which can help make meaning more obvious. A lot of times, my posts include elements of sarcasm and hyperbole that I know is present, but that doesn't always come through in bare text, distorting my points. I remember well that I was often deemed a "fundamentalist" in the early days of the Old School Renaissance for my strong stances about this or that and that always baffled me.  I realize now that some of that misunderstanding was a result of imprecision in my original posts.

That's why, over the coming weeks and months, you'll see a series of Reconsiderations posts in which I look back on both individual posts and larger topics I've discussed on this blog in the past, with an eye toward correcting misconceptions about my opinions, as well as, where necessary, indicating how my thoughts may have changed since I first wrote them. I hope this will prove an interesting series and generate some discussion. I also hope it'll be a good capstone to Grognardia as a whole.