What I am going to try and focus on for the next few weeks–and success is far from certain–is feeling new things. Virtually by definition, if I am typing here I am not living. I am not “out there”. I like to think my vocalized processing, my journal-notations here, are useful to some, and it seems likely. At the same time, there is an Ayn Rand quote that has stuck in my mind: “I have seldom enjoyed anything concrete or in the present tense. That locomotive ride was one of the very few times when I enjoyed a moment for its own sake.”
I have numerous essays planned, but I am going to put them off for the moment, and focus on retooling how I work. I bought “Getting Things Done”, and it seems congruent with my own feelings on work.
On Ayn Rand, the basic argument I wanted to make, and will eventually, is that her mother was a narcissist, and that the entirety of her output is a combination of reaction to that fact, and to her experiences in Russia following the Bolshevik coup. Her ideas, self evidently, warrant exploration as well in depth, but I am going to postpone all that for some period of time when I have learned to work non-spasmodically.
Knowing me, I won’t not post, but in some ways the reelection of Obama is a source of relaxation for me, a release. There is no argument I can make that will be heard widely enough to matter. So I can take some time off for reflection. It’s hard to know if I made ANY difference in any event, but I can say honestly I did what I could with what I had.