More specifically concerning: habit
01.06.01
1 June 2001, around 8.09.
Friday. Morning in various libraries, reading about the second sophistic. The LRR is shut from tomorrow until October, which saddens me a great deal: my last two weeks in England spent without access to its darkened portraits and harried classicists. Still, there are other libraries available, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve gotten into […]
2.08.01
2 August 2001, around 14.44.
The very light is altered, or simply different. There is an air about the place, this home, that both entices and fills me with foreboding. The normalcy of little things, scanning the shelves for books, toppling things gracelessly onto the floor, and yet so much has changed – furniture moved, or simply gone. Suffice to […]
8.08.01
8 August 2001, around 14.46.
First snatch at solitude; how sweet indeed it is. I have missed (oh how very much!) the joy of waking to an empty house, all the silences responding to my footsteps, brushing away the dust of evening entirely at my leisure (which means, of course, I need not hide away in bed, avoiding the day’s […]
9.08.01
9 August 2001, around 14.47.
To be more joyful, and border less on abject self-pity, I have taken to pillaging the shelves in my former room (now the library – which is apt) for books to take away; I fear my parents shall be left with hardly any modern literature at all. They merely smile at me, though, as I […]
15.03.02 – Friday
15 March 2002, around 21.25.
Most mornings, when I wake, I stumble to the kitchen to make myself an espresso. This has, by now, become a habit so ingrained that the very smell of strong coffee causes me to feel as though I were wearing pajamas and had just rolled out of bed. It’s a comfortable feeling. If I were […]
29.05.02 – Wednesday
29 May 2002, around 20.18.
It starts in the morning with laundry. No – that’s not quite it. It starts when they knock on my door at eight a.m. and I am not yet awake; in truth, I had opened my eyes to face the world at a quarter to seven, but the world at that point seemed irrelevant to […]
28.06.02 – Friday
28 June 2002, around 13.46.
‘I can always tell when you’re reading somewhere in the house,’ my mother used to say. ‘There’s a special silence, a reading silence.’ I never heard it, this extra degree of hush that somehow travelled through walls and ceilings to announce that my seven-year-old self had become about as absent as a present person could […]
My prophetic soul
4 March 2003, around 20.14.
…we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t […]
somnium alienae
27 March 2003, around 7.41.
It was a strange dream. Of course, it was a strange sleep as well—dozing in the middle of the afternoon over Tristram Shandy and half-a-cup of tepid coffee, only to wake to the first signs of dawn at five in the morning. It was, I say, a strange dream. A restaurant in some unknown country, […]
Consumers of Culture
14 April 2003, around 14.43.
It is only through difference that progress has been made. What threatens us right now is probably what we may call overcommunication—that is, the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts of the world. In order for a culture to be really itself and […]
periplum
30 June 2004, around 8.00.
Postcard (from the editor of the text to his godmother) found in a copy of ‘Urne Buriall’ and ‘The Garden of Cyrus’ … according to the notion I have of reason, neither the written treatises of the learned nor the set discourses of the eloquent are able of themselves to teach the use of it. […]
daily
14 February 2014, around 22.11.
Taking pictures around the house. It’s the repeated, regular acts – the habits – that are, oddly, the most interesting thing. I wouldn’t have thought it. For his own part, Adams inclined to think that neither chaos nor death was an object to him as a searcher of knowledge – neither would have vogue in […]
Montaigne 1.23
19 June 2015, around 9.15.
‘Philosophy and Christian Art’ (1868) by Daniel Huntington What can be more barbarous than to see a nation where, by lawful custom, the office of a judge is sold, and judgements are paid for in good ready money, and where justice is by law denied to him who has not the wherewithal to pay for […]
nordiska
15 May 2019, around 6.06.
There is only one sweater that I make, really. I try to follow different patterns, but the result usually ends up being more or less the sweater that I always make. This holds true for other things too – the ways in which I work, the ways in which I read, usw. I try other […]
radiant
22 May 2019, around 10.38.
A rut is only a problem if you don’t like where you’re going.
habitus
20 January 2020, around 9.19.
It is pleasant to return to familiar walks, a matter of habitus.
unus dies par omni
28 February 2023, around 4.50.
Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ. Nature is wont to be hidden. —Heraclitus (Bywater fr. 10) There is snow outside and a fire going in the fireplace. The black dog is asleep, her tail beating against the carpet with the rhythm of her dreams. The sky is louring, pressing down the hill into the white of the trees; […]
matutinal
14 February 2024, around 18.43.
This morning, the morning books were not working. They have grown in number, which is part of the problem. Really there should be only one morning book; perhaps two. The book should be both rigorous enough to require some attention (which helps one to wake up) but also interesting enough to provide a spark of […]
force of habit
17 March 2024, around 18.08.
Whatever habit has rendered delightful, will be relinquished with reluctance, and will continue to be consumed notwithstanding a very heavy tax; but this reluctance has its limits… —David Ricardo (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, p. 241) Every step outward would then be harmful to this introverted book living in its own idyllic […]
the best of bees
9 August 2024, around 18.00.
Buzzing about in the small comforts of routine. Avoiding even the hint of a thought.
start your cognitions
25 August 2024, around 17.40.
The story of the sleepers is followed by some moral observations which appear to have no connection with it. But this apparent irrelevance is deceptive… —C.G. Jung (The Four Archetypes, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 70) Slept in this morning until nearly six, when the dog made her desire for breakfast known. Managed to step onto […]