I have seventeen drafts in my desk drawer. Seventeen beginnings that never found their ends. Some are addressed to people I no longer speak to. Some are addressed to versions of myself that no longer exist. I wonder if the act of writing a letter matters more than sending it — if the confession is the point, not the confession's arrival.
Rilke would say the questions are enough. Tonight, I believe him.
Discovered a second-hand bookshop three streets from campus that I somehow never noticed in two years. The owner is an elderly man who quotes Ovid while ringing up purchases. I bought a 1962 edition of The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats for four pounds. The margins are full of someone else's notes — another reader's fingerprints on the same words.
There is a whole essay to be written about the archaeology of marginalia. Every used book is a palimpsest.
Failed my attempt to read Ulysses for the third time. Got further than before — page 247 — but the Oxen of the Sun chapter defeated me again. There is no shame in this. Some books are meant to be attempted, not completed. The attempt itself is the education.
Switched to Calvino instead. He writes like someone explaining a dream with perfect clarity.
Stayed in the library until they turned the lights off. Literally. The security guard found me asleep at a desk with my face on a copy of Marcus Aurelius. He was kind about it. Said it happens more often than you'd think. I believe him — the Stoics have that effect.
"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." I wrote it on my hand so I wouldn't forget. The ink has smudged but the idea hasn't.