Writer's Diary
7/1/26
Monday felt like portals opening and closing, timelines changing, the fate cutters playing with the length of the string, for no particular reason, and for no particular immediate consequence.
It’s hard not to feel that all political crisis is downstream of spiritual crisis.
Silicon Valley will never patronize real artists because it is interested in efficiency, not greatness, and represses the possibility of the great or beautiful soul in the interest of the rational or efficient soul.
I can feel all the ways in which overstimulation has made me stupider, like a general, like a Napoleon surveying a battlefield the day after the battle, and the smoke has cleared and the corpses bake in the sun.
If you think about the sheer improbability of any single organism surviving on a rock flying through space for more than a split second, then your own continued dependable existence starts to seem like a miracle by an order of magnitude.
I crave solitude but have forgotten how to use it.
Roberto Calasso writes, “Yet in statues created not in temples but in craftsmen’s workshops, something of the divine presence persisted. Otherwise, the merchant Imperius wouldn’t have worried about those statues being contaminated by the company of ignorant passengers. There was a blend of wiliness and devotion in him that only Greeks know to practice. The merchant knew very well that his job didn’t involve selling simulacra. But he recognized their divine aura. Indeed, he wanted to protect it. He insisted that statues sail alone, undisturbed by human presence.”
You do not get royalties for inventing a new form of theater.
Very few people enjoy being surrounded by equals.
To be open-minded is to be modern. To be closed-minded or tribal is to be ancient. And there is much to be said for the ancient, just as there is something to be said for the modern.
For Plato, to copy was to degrade and to destroy perfect knowledge, but all we do is copy. We make copies of copies of copies of copies. Repost, meme, paraphrase.
All arcana has to do with the immortality of the soul.
Hermeneutics begins with its corporality and limitedness.
One senses that the ancients kept the ashes of the dead in their gardens, and the gardens were to be shared by ghosts along with living. In some parts of the world today, it is still the same.
The Greeks did not practice pity, but that is all we practice today.
It is always funny to find out that two people—who are shallow or trivial souls—have become friends and congratulate themselves on meeting up regularly for aperitifs.
It seems like all world civilizations can be defined by whether they had contact with the wisdom of Egypt or not (or rather we might say that Tibet is to the east what Egypt is to the west).
It’s sometimes hard to explain to the idealist that you would like things to work out well too—just in reality.
An obsession with small peripheral details is usually an evasion rather than embrace of art.
We are imprints of the oversoul like stamps on a wax tablet.