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- If you close your eyes, you should be able to tell what season it is. If you can’t, something is wrong. On warmish winter days, I often cannot tell — all I know is that it’s not summer. The seasons have become schizophrenic.
- It is a matter of causality: the weather used to change us, now we have changed the weather.
- David Hume calls instinct “something very extraordinary and inexplicable by all the disquisitions of human understanding” that “acts in us unknown to ourselves.” We call ourselves free, but really, we are instinctual. We build civilizations the way birds build nests.
- I end this year on a lethargic note: unsure of if I have anything interesting left to say. I have not been very aggressive about educating myself this year. The older I get, the more I seek comfort and repetition over change.
- Keats: “And what is love/ It is a doll dress’d up/ For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;/ A thing of misnomers, so divine/ that silly youth doth think to make itself/ divine by loving.” How often I feel this way — like I can redeem my own silly life by leaps of erotic imagination. Love is instrumentalized for the sake of making us more interesting to ourselves.
- According to Kierkegaard, “resignation” requires “strength and energy and freedom.” I find this very interesting, very true. Often the laziest people are the most existentially optimistic.
- There is so much to learn, that the impulse to self-educate becomes overwhelmed, and must turn…
