I can picture why writing in a library or an extra-open-to-opening-books-without-buying-them bookstore would be magical. I’d like to select a book at random, flip through to find the gist or a potent passage, and then quote at length. The Internet does not function as well for such a thing. I supposed I could go to the Stanford dictionary of philosophy (it’s actually an encyclopedia) and select a section at random and see what come from that. But then I’m at the mercy of the Internet’s loading speeds, and Stanford probably throttles speeds from the actual home of the Greek philosophers, not wanting to offend anyone. So instead I’ll muse about how convenient it would be if I were in a library right now. I could just pop over to the philosophy section or even the new literary fiction section and select at random, eyes closed. Then I would either be on the trailing edge or the cutting edge, immersed in the way people saw or see the world and themselves and other people. And I could then quote whole pages with annotations, and that would be writing. Maybe even some kind of art, though I think if you use that word, it cannot be that thing.
The smell of the slightly wet, well-cooked soil is powerful this morning. It’s mid-July, many months through a year, and as I said it’s morning. My body is responding to the goat I ate last night and the many, many meters of climbing and descending done on a bicycle yesterday. Some of it you should have seen. Other bits you’d be happy to have missed, such as the way I had to practice my authoritative “get the hell back” voice for various dogs guarding various goats. I appreciate the sun, but I hide myself from it under a hat and long sleeves and long pants. Maybe that makes me less threatening to the dogs as well.
When and for whom will the bell toll today? It’s Sunday, so it must toll. Perhaps for thee, almost certainly not for me, a stranger.
Stanford finally relented to this gatecrasher from across the pond, and their “Random Entry” button worked quickly. But I was lead to “Formalism” and a long, table of contented epistemological dive into mathematical tools for examining beliefs. Does Harvard have an encyclopedia of literary fiction?
The petrichor is wonderful. If you haven’t been to a place prone to wildfires but also to growing grapes, you need to get there in the summer, but before the wildfires. To breathe deep of the roasting dirt. But perhaps breathe deep under a pergola or otherwise in the shade. But still drink the red wine, even if it’s hot. It matches the smell of the soil better than the lighter stuff.
I had a dream about workplaces yesterday. Someone very earnest was punished for their earnestness by being fired in front of everyone. This seems to represent my qualms with workplaces in a single-sentence piece of realistic fiction, concisely and almost fully.
I wonder if it’s the distilled grapes that lead to quite memorable dreams last night. I will no longer reject the end-of-the-meal offer of a tiny carafe of the strong stuff. I like having dreams, even if they’re intense and a little unsettling. It’s a second life, a life that is of the nonexistent mind, playing out in a somehow-coherent way, in a place that does not cohere into anything.
Stanford does a little better with its next random walk through a strange encyclopedia: Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, apparently a polemicist and socialite (a combination that seems far less likely than “polemicist and loner”). He didn’t like Kant at all, and looks more into the individual than into abstract principles (other than, of course, the principle of God). He created the simple path to the easy polemic: nihilism, the ultimate charge, punishable by that thing itself.
What does it take to be a polemicist-socialite? Living in a social place, going to lots of parties, and finding controversial topics to slice one’s pen through in a somewhat consistent way, without losing the invitations to all those parties. An interesting profession that I need to look further into.
Roman Ryan 