Friday. I woke up far too late today, but I needed to sleep.
Waiting for things to happen, career things mainly, wears me out.
During a time of rampant inflation, doing nothing feels like losing; the dollar you start the morning with is slightly less valuable than the dollar you have at night.
It’s difficult to know yourself periods of static anxiety and static nervousness. It's hard to surrender moments to leisure. To love. To freedom. To sitting and listening and breaking bread.
There's something so curiously dead and unsexy about turning oneself into an economic machine—running from place to place to maintain every potentially economically advantageous obligation, to maintaining the network.
I understand why New York City is expensive. In theory, it's a great place to live. In theory, it's a (social) garden of delight, but more than even time and money, you need poise. Patience. The ability to focus and adjudicate choices: a code of values that actually allows you to live and not just react.
Thinking about how Montaigne didn't fortify his house; unlike his noble neighbors, unlike every other noble in France practically, he didn't hide his silver or his title deed. He died of natural causes in a time of civil war with a good reputation.
You actually have to say no to things—to the mechanical life of earning and consuming; you have to have a canon of values that you assert, give priority to it.
If you live in a 24-7 marketplace, if you live as homo economicus 24-7, if you're always available for If you live in this vast and invisible machine, you'll never finish a single book, never read a poem. Never write in a journal, never pray, never drink wine for lunch. Never land the floor and stare at the ceiling. Never practice a language, never write a letter to a friend. You'll never know your soul, and your soul will never know you: the two spheres will never enter into a loop of mutual aid and development, spiritual and habitual.
I feel like I'm ready to graduate from the School of Crisis; that I was a freshman in 2020, that I'm a senior now in 2024, in this weird apocalyptic and anxious era, this anxious education. I'm ready to move on and to purge myself of the person who developed in response to this perma-crisis. I want to peel away all the protective shields to reach the core, the core that was, or to discover that there is no core to me. This is the Kafkaesque journey I'd like to undertake, or to discover that I've been undertaking for a long time, like waking up on an airplane after having been asleep since prior to take-off.
I can't think of a single great writer who was ever a believer in an orthodox religion, or approached religion in an orthodox way; all great writers are heretics and agnostics. Literature is the process of drilling deep under the crust of the self till a great hole opens and the black, spectral liquid of God starts to leak upwards.
I think I've not read The Trial during 2020s because it would be too painfully real.
The Court of Public Opinion, The Unconscious, algorithmic court, is very Kafka. It's real and dreamlike, precise and logical at the same time.