Something in me has become somewhat cattywampus because I cannot decide between writing or reading in the morning, and am starting to prefer to read, over nonfiction—usually depressing or at least soberly descriptive of the world and currently Surveillance Capitalism—the fiction I usually read before bed, currently Within a Budding Grove. Reading the fiction over the nonfiction starts the day with a dreamy context. I think it goes back to what I wrote above, where what I’m interested in is the removal from time. It’s like what Lazenby said about philosophy in his “gun to my head answer“, that it, at least to his interpretation of the ancients, was to find a permanent present from which one could seek a kind of refuge from any one given time or occurrence, a permanent present which by virtue of its permanence affords a kind of endurance and allows a respite from any situation as isolated in time.
That’s not entirely what he said, but that’s my reading of it now. And in the morning novel, like the evening I look for something like that. It’s not quite there because its descriptions of situations and relations isolated in time, rather than a set of declarations or assumptions about the world that allow a kind of consistency through or despite time, but it moves me away from the storm winds and vicissitudes that the demand of emotion can cry out for in a moment and puts me—especially with Proust—in a kind of extended meditation within a moment, where we have all the time in the world to go over the emotional content present in a relation and luxuriate in that in a way reality could almost never afford.
Of course, today, I started writing. Which I think is healthiest, like a constitutional.