Re-reading my 2018 diary, I found this from July.

Rejoinder to recent thoughts on the impermanence of writing. A helpful metaphor for writings is buildings. There are many buildings which last a century or two, are tended and lived in by people who want to see them remain standing. And that is one of the great aims for a writer, to have a book still read a century or two after it is written. There are only a few outstanding buildings preserved for many centuries, buildings which have acquired a sense of awe and prestige. But at the other end there are many other buildings. Perhaps most blogging is like building a cubby house for kids to enjoy for anything from a day to a few years; or perhaps it’s like putting up a tent for a week at a caravan park. It has its purpose, we need these temporary shelters and we live in them a time – but there’s no handwringing about their temporariness. And then the average suburban house is something like most books people write. Shiny and good looking for a time when it’s built, but it looks dated one or two decades later. It stays standing for thirty or forty years, and then it’s knocked over when someone wants the block for something else.