”In case people didn’t notice, we’ve actually been in this decision process, sort of taking stock and seeing what was viable for us going forward,  since January 1,” Tucker said from his North Texas home. That was when Tucker concluded a monumental if little-heralded project called “31 Days of Cheer,” posting at least one uplifting, positive, affirmative, life-enhancing, humorous, brave or bold item every day of the month.

       Sources close to Tucker say the Promethean effort of finding 31 good things about the world while battling a bizarre and painful near-paralysis of the neck, learning of the death of a longtime friend,  and watching his beloved Dallas Cowboys crater and miss the playoffs left him “exhausted and close to despair,” especially as December readership figures plummeted in part due to holiday distractions.

       Others painted a rosier picture, repeating Tucker’s often-stated belief that the blog had “pretty well served its purpose over the years.”

         ”Look, the guy’s done everything he set out to do with this blog,” said one long-winded  Muse Machine insider. “Go back to the guiding principles he laid out here. He wanted to comment on important issues. He did. He wanted to see if he could maintain the discipline of a blog over time. I’d say 1,600 posts checks that one off. And he wanted to do the whole thing in a way that reflected what he thought was the best of himself and of the American character, not the worst. Read it and judge for yourself. I don’t think he’s got anything left to prove.” 

         Muse Machine was never one of the best-read or most-commented-on blogs on the Web, averaging  50-100 independent viewers a month at its peak in 2010,  according to WordPress statisticians.  From the blog’s beginning in April 2007, Tucker steadfastly denied that he was interested in vast legions of chatty readers, often noting that many blog commenters were “vile, foul-mouthed, and far less articulate than George W. Bush.” Even as his readership dropped, Tucker maintained that his real interest in the blog was as a proving ground or “incubator” for ideas that often made their way into magazine pieces or radio commentaries.

        “I’m a writer,” Tucker told Small Blog Daily in 2008. “I like to take an idea and work with it, see where it goes, and see what the process teaches me. I don’t need a grandstand full of people to do that.” 

      But  blog watcher Herm Simbitz, author of How Facebook Killed the Little Blogger , says that despite his brave front, Tucker must have been keenly disappointed to see his efforts ignored by so much of the public–a fate suffered by thousands of small bloggers since the astonishing rise of Facebook in 2009. 

       ”Let’s face facts,” said Simbitz. “Your typical Web-browsing person who used to check in on a blog like Muse Machine just doesn’t have time for that anymore. I mean, who cares about some unknown guy out in Texas with his finely tuned sense of irony and his references to a bunch of dead authors when you can be Facebooking about that great new Thai place and ‘liking’ your old high school boyfriend’s post about the new Labrador puppy he just bought?”

       Simbitz also noted that the very qualities that Tucker prized in Muse Machine–fair-mindedness, the exaltation of reason, a general sense that despite the constant presence of evil and the perplexities of existence, each day truly is a gift–may have proved fatal to the blog in the end. 

       ”Come on, seriously, does anybody care about that stuff anymore?” asked Simbitz.  ”What really delights people is conflict, profanity, violence, humiliating people and rhetorically ripping their guts out. The whole Jets vs. Sharks thing of American politics.  Nobody cares about some nice guy with a degree in English and a bunch of opinions. I mean, look at the name–”Muse” Machine. That says it all, for God’s sake.  We ain’t got time for musing, baby.” 

       For his part, Tucker denies that Muse Machine is no more, citing–naturally–Mark Twain’s line about those exaggerated reports of his death.

       ”I’m just taking some time to think about what the blog should be,” Tucker said. “I want it always to be an adventure, even if it’s just an adventure for me. I don’t want to just do the same old thing just because  I’m good at doing the same old thing. We’ll see. Stay tuned.” 

A note of happiness rings through Updike’s prose, and draws us to it, makes us happy when we read it. It is not a fatuous happiness, or a happiness unaware of death (a preoccupation with death and dying was a steady feature of his work), but neither does it cede too much to mere mortality. One has a sense of someone who—as much as, though with more wit than, Andy Warhol—has spent a good deal of his life liking things. Women’s clothes, their hair, the hybridization of American accents; the way that the hyper-cold of the airline baggage compartment can be felt like a secret in the bag as you unpack—all these images and moments, recalled at random from his work, are not just reported but quietly rhapsodized, registered with love. It is his affections that rise, and that we recall.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. . . Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. 

Walter Pater, from The Renaissance

And though our life in that manifestation often turns out to be a bit of trash, still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root. I, for example, want to live so as to satisfy my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy just my reasoning capacity alone, which is some twentieth part of my whole capacity for living. What does reason know? Reason knows only what it has managed to learn . . . while human nature acts as an entire whole, with everything that is in it, consciously and unconsciously, and though it lies, still it lives.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

Everybody’s thinking about how to make the New Year a better year. In other words, we’re talking change. And as longtime readers who have not abandoned MM for Facebook know, MM is all about change and the thousand picky particulars that prevent it.  Here, as we prepare to launch into 2012, are some change-related classics from the past:

Workin’ on the Change Gang: New Year’s Renewal

Happiness is desired by all men, and moments of it are probably attained by most men. Only moments of it can be attained because happiness is the inner concomitant of neat harmonies of body, spirit, and society; and these neat harmonies are bound to be infrequent. There is no simple harmony between our ambitions and our achievements because all ambitions tend to outrun achievements. There is no neat harmony between the conscious ends of life and the physical instruments for its attainment, for the health of the body is frail and uncertain. . . There is no neat harmony between personal desires and ambitions and the ends of human societies no matter how frantically we insist with the eighteenth century that communities are created only for the individual.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

But still. . .

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Here you find none of the thundering, blustering certainty that makes most political discourse today unbearable; instead, you see a great writer trying to follow the truth wherever it seems to lead. Key quote:

His character was an extraordinarily mixed one, but there 
was almost nothing in it that you can put your finger on and call bad, 
and I believe that even Gandhi’s worst enemies would admit that he was an 
interesting and unusual man who enriched the world simply by being alive. 
Whether he was also a lovable man, and whether his teachings can have 
much for those who do not accept the religious beliefs on which they are 
founded, I have never felt fully certain. 

The full text of this great essay is here.

Here’s a favorite Christmas song by John Lennon and the inexplicable Yoko Ono. The lyrics are hopeful but tinged with just enough reality to save it from the too-sugary pile.