Anticipating a new year...

Unfortunately, despite bright ambition and meticulous planning, sickness and ill health may prevent forward movement. I intended to have spun into motion the new year before it happened, but sometimes you can't get ahead of nature. Ailment tempers and wears like waves breaking on a strong coast line; the only bright streak runnng through it is that spiritual and mental awareness that shimmers like an insoluble precious metal, but better- more permanent.

The spirit that runs through the span of a life only fades if the body fails to carry it; it returns to its original substance- the infinite and indefinable whole.

But I'm suffering from exaggeration and making overly-hyperbolic statements. It's only flu. It's only slight. Thus I'll wait for my body to return to its former capabilities. To be host to spiritual and academic development, moral and ethical speculation; that is my body's purpose, it seems. Of course I appreciate the primordial and the raw appeal of nature, but when I am switched on, I'm switched on. The purpose right now is to finish the last part of my part-time studies and then resume the reading that I took such a protracted break from.

I suppose being an academic is in large part a suffering; specific research and tedious reviews of past information down a narrow track. Sometimes it is better to operate on a far looser and more open-minded basis. The path for me for the next eight months is to resume what I think will improve my spiritual self...

I intend to read Walt Whitman, Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the works of Henry James and a whole collection of nineteenth century American literature that I might not otherwise have the opportunity to get through. There a sense I gather that the eventual pattern of literature influenced the folk movements of the sixties and a trend of literature epitomized by writers such as William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. I want to understand how individual expression grew through writers.


I wish to finish Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time eventually, I would like to explore the poetry and less renowned stories of Victor Hugo. I would like to read more Alexandre Dumas and then move on to the works of Albert Camus and such like.


I would like to explore the Russian romantic scene: Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, more of Leo Tolstoy... I would then like to explore the latter day writers, Alexander Solzhenstyn being a prime example. I would like to get to grips with the human question. If I am ever going to develop an effectual latter-day philosophy then I sure will have to understand the past.

I adore literature, I adore the subtle manner in which its trends permeate our generation's songwriting. I love the way that humanity can communicate inner details of spirituality with visual expression. It means that we will always have a point of reference to hold onto, backtrack towards. In order to move forwards it is imperative that we find ways of creating value, of providing a basis for community and tempering urban development.

It is my concern that we have found ourselves in an untenable situation. Like Thoreau was once to say about the railways system, we have new and fast developments but we do not ncessarily have the temperance or the wisdom to move forwards ourselves. You can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet within seconds in these latter days, but is there much to say? Yes, this is the fundamental issue. This is what is at stake: we can, all of us, focus on making life easier or we can make it more valuable.

Cultural hegemony is perhaps the most important issue. What happens when a man is imprisoned? Is he rehabilitated? No, the insidious trends is to temper the man by limiting his freedom, but my making his life a convenience. Do farm animals know how to live in nature after being tamed by man. The answer is clear: no. The horizons of man are limited by universal currency, generic commercial production, limited opportunities.

Privatised industry and corporate capital development has almost ruined man.

What is essential? What is it that we are missing? The existence of community, of reliance on neighbours, the lessons taught in life by a hard day's work. Otherwise the world is warped and deformed. The natural environment is lost and replaced with one in which we are only temporarily secure and our values are fixed lessons. Our education is prescribed and is not flexible, and our university education superfluous; we are not taught enough about the world and our society informs us that state education will give us the relevant answers. We are dead beats, and our lives only become worth living when we understand that we might have our own identity.

I read an article about family life in Seoul in North Korea wherein the children spent more than eight hours each day online and programming. The family dynamic was lost until the internet was cut off as part of a test. Days later the family grew tighter and satisfaction came from elsewhere. Our abundance of distraction may lead to the destruction of the family dynamic; I say, what could be worse?

I intend to write later in the year a new philosophy based upon my own readings and my slow cultivation of an new moral framework. I lost my religion some time ago. Where it stands now is somewhere between pantheism and deism. I mostly keep my distance from the latter, however. I wish to provide a new philosophical text with actual humanitarian leanings, quite distinct from any dogmaticism or idealism; I wish to give my ideas a practical footing. It is my sole interest to give what I can. There is no life for me that isn't philosophy, an interest in preserving community and coming to an understanding of what might be sustainable in the long term.

I might have to find a few ecologists, a few historians and some social workers. It's a broad plan, but it's the only one I have.