Suddenly I am slightly recovered from the awful emptiness of my thoughts once again, and for some reason I am becoming a little reconciled with this dim and fickle version of reality within which I am dwelling at present. I saw the stones of Jerusalem and I cried, as if the ultimate concern of everything were to become part of the stone again, to be just one stone more of the cemetery that leads the innocent drivers into the truths of the city: my first city of death. Eternity is something awful, it is like the full emptiness of the space, the metaphysical silence of the immeasurable time in which the soul and the self happen to exist. Philosophy must be taken very seriously; it is something from which I stand now so completely unprotected as it were. Time is the enemy of life and freedom, is the secrete divine weapon that makes earthly existence so futile, but then eternity on the other hand is a very dangerous silence, I don´t want this silence, I refuse to make myself at home in it. Efraim told me once that people begin to write seriously at the age of 26 and I would like to think that this is true; certainly the pain of younger years recedes to the back of the imagination and the memory and is replaced by a more sober and colder version of the world which we are ought to battle day after day and at the same time unable to. I´ve assimilated Sandra´s project of philosophy to the purest core of my being in flesh and soul: ontological belief – this is my most non-deistic concept ever but yet it is not theological.
I feel relieved to hear the German language again. It is like the perennial home of philosophy has always stood for me in that language and in that literature but I am scared from my so completely absolute otherness in that grammar and order of ideas. Two languages are lost; both the mother tongue and the language home of the philosophy and literature that defined my birth as an individual in the hunger and the anger of Jerusalem. I might want to deny it, but having written the proposal did mark a certain turning point in my life, I have now this sense of quiet, this sense of a Holzweg, of having defined the rules of my own grammar and the syntactic constrictions that this grammar would impose upon my reality as it is. Who would have thought about it back then? The footsteps of Gillian Rose: Hegel and the Absolute in a most deliberate struggle against time, even against lifetime, the ceaseless fight against disease and against madness and death and philosophy and history; the never ending but now unreachable temptation of Christianity and the antinomian melancholy. How can people take this so light-headedly? It requires so much to read Kant and Hegel, it demands the experience of absolute time, and it requires the abandonment of the concepts of the world that are thus replaced by this murderous sense of time in which we are dying all the time. You write and write and write and yet can´t be saved, everything is being consumed and dissolved into this fountain of bare encounters; it is not philosophy but religion what mediates and helps us make compromises with the world and that is why it is so much grander and more articulate than philosophy; to do philosophy means at the most essential point, to abandon the possibility of the mediation and to throw ourselves against the world of gravity and biological decay with the last vestige of freedom that the time of Death/God has left us: the chance to make one sole choice – you choose yourself for the compromises or you don´t, and when you don´t, it helps not whether you stood in front of the Wall. Eternity is the consolation of philosophy but there´s no eternity in philosophy at all; philosophy stands for everything that eternity is not and yet it articulates eternity so well.
I feel this pain in the throat, and whenever it comes, I feel death is coming. But it is always because of the smoking, yet I can´t quit fantasizing. Most of the time I prefer novels over Kant: They make me feel a lot safer.
Alain De Botton: Normal Life = Life without Love “The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn´t ring” “Authorship becomes tempting to those who can´t speak” “The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once (we soon feel ungrateful) or those who never allow us to kiss them (we soon forget them), but those who know how carefully to administer varied doses of hope and despair”
I hate novels written only in the 1st person
Be Botton: Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
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