Alpha double negative...

Well, I haven't written in some time, and within reason. I lived out in the countryside for a while and then started missing the folks I knew. I also realised that the time I've spent occupied by literature and philosophy has come to a natural and comfortable rest.

I guess philosophy never leaves you, but I'm in the middle of six different books at the moment and I've decided against finishing them while I consolidate my credits at university. Anyway, learning about Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is quite a pleasure. So I will wave goodbye to Proust, Cicero, Dostoesvsky and Solzenitsyn for the time being. Sixteen months is a good length of serious reading.

I've been thinking about taking to writing more, dancing (I've taken up swing and blues), and learning to play my own songs. As for this journal, I'm not sure. I'll get back to it. ;)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Delirium and Drift

“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”  - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star It is so unnatural to even return here, after so much. One might question returning to an old haunt, where everything has been so long dead, but there is a debt which cannot be forfeited, a collapsing star back then that went unnoticed. These past years have passed by in such an unclear manner that I may even have forgotten that I was living, merely existing in this loose fabric of time, stuttering out the minor parts of a much longer story. Ever since I can remember it was this way; losing footing, losing my way because of some underlying suffering that I could never resolve. It expressed itself uncannily, through a high bound empathy with all suffering, it brought me down, it dictated the terms of a reality that was incompatible with actual reality. Two worlds; that of the impossible dream and the actual realities where emotional resilience is not so commonplace. So let me be v...
Read more about it »

Memory

An exquisite memory, elegant in how even it remembers its tangents, its dreams upon waking. Just as in literature there are not only words on the page but words between words, tiny effervescences and ruptures as an unlikely pairing signifies deeper inwards. Foster Wallace on the novelist Marcel Proust: "Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth's curve, and the only part of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid's geometric relation to the distant church spire at Combray), riding in station wagons' backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets." - Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley , David Foster Wallace This caught my eye, n...
Read more about it »

"Are All Humans Hedonists?"

Before I settle into something different, read some Francois Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel and hope from the same or similar experience as when I read Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, there's a question to be answered which sent me to sleep the other night with the question: Why speak? I had written elusively on this epiphany the other night whilst watching Oldboy, a film about repressed desire, desire repressed from the outside, through hypnosis and through diminishing the reality of the prisoner, this constant repetition of two dimensional television avatars suggesting escape, but actually reinforcing the repression, actually offering a sort of imprisonment.  And why speak? was a question that seemed so significant, though it fades through thinking, especially with set vocabularies, rhythms of speech, even stylings that permeate the way the written word presents itself. But loosening its meaning is of incomparable value: before we speak, we think. We think and...
Read more about it »