When I was eight years old, if someone told me that there would come a morning when, before dawn, I would be getting ready to get on a train to discuss my new company’s website, while at the same time sending e-mails discussing the acquisition strategies of Indian and Chinese conglomerates and the efforts of Japan’s food and beverage brands to globalize, and that I would, later that day, be submitting an application for a visa to travel to India to meet with bureau chiefs of major global media outlets, before getting a hepatitis shot, and that finally, I would, the whole time, in the back of my mind, be thinking about neoplatonic philosophers, about the architecture of slide from idealism to theurgy, and about all the attempts to reconcile emerging Christian thought with classical philosophy, and vice versa, before what ended up coalescing into doctrine, I’m not sure I would have even known how to believe it, let alone whether. 

And to be writing a blog post about it, which I would then share on Facebook and Twitter as well… In fact, even at twenty-eight, it would have been an enormous stretch of the imagination, to be living in 2011, and to be living in 211 and 311 and 411, too. Such strange paths there are in this world!

Many times it has happened: Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvellous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the loftiest order; enacting the noblest life, acquiring identity with the divine; stationing within It by having attained that activity; poised above whatsoever within the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the soul ever enter into my body, the soul which, even within the body, is the high thing it has shown itself to be.

Plotinus, The Enneads, IV, 8

Life is love of life.

This sinking one’s teeth into the things which the act of eating involves above all measure the surplus of the reality…is the way the I, the absolute commencement, is suspended in the non-I.

The underlying tragic element in the ego [is] the fact that it is riveted to its own being.

Even if the content of life ensures my life, the means is immediately sought as an end, and the pursuit of this end becomes an end in its turn.

What it [the human being] lacks is its source of plenitude and wealth. Need, a happy dependence, is capable of satisfaction, like a void, which gets filled.

Borrowed quote salad, all from Levinas, all via Social Theory & Private Affairs

Giant of gold! king of fire in the mind,
Ruler of light; with you, above all else,
The splendid source of life’s prolific fount;
And from on high you pour the wealth of your
Harmonic streams into our world of matter here.         5

Hear! for high above, on planes of ether,
And in the world’s bright middle realm you reign,
While all things by your sovereign power are filled
With mind-enflaming, providential care.
The fires of stars surround your vigorous fire,     10

And ever in unwearied, ceaseless dance,
Their vivid dew on earth’s wide bosom drops.
By your eternal and repeated course
The hours and seasons come and go;
And elements opposed are joined in harmony,     15

In sight of your majestic beams, great king,
From deity ineffable and secret born.
Unmoving Fates will yield to your command,
Roll back the fatal thread of mortal lives;
For wide-extended sovereign sway is yours.    20

From your fair series of attractive songs,
Divinely charming, Phoebus leaps forth 
into light in joy; and with his god-like harp,
To rapture strung, he calms the raging din
Of dire-resounding Matter’s mighty flood.           25

And from your gentle dance, repelling harm,
A healing Hymn expands its light,
Diffusing Health, and filling all the world
With streams of harmony.
You, too, they celebrate in sacred song          30

The illustrious source whence mighty Bacchus came;
In matter’s utmost churning depths they chant
“Euan Ate” to you forever,
While others sound your praise in tuneful verse,
As famed Adonis, delicate and fair.              35

Ferocious daemons, noxious to mankind,
Dread the dire anger of your rapid scourge;
These Daemons plot a thousand ills,
And hatch their plans for wretched souls
That founder in life’s dreadful-sounding seas.  40

Enslaved and shackled by the body’s chains,
Souls lose all thought of fire sublime
And in the dark abyss they writhe.
O best of gods, spirit blessed and crowned with fire,
Image of nature’s all-producing god,            45

And leader of our souls to realms of light-
Hear! and purify my stains of guilt;
Receive the supplication of my pleas,
And wash away the poison from my wounds!
Release me from the torments of my sins, 50

And mitigate the swift, all-seeing eye
Of justice, boundless in its view!
By your pure law, the constant foe of evil,
Direct my steps, and pour your sacred light
In rich abundance on my darkened soul!       55

Dispel the dismal and malignant shades
Of darkness, pregnant with invenomed ills!
Give me strength! And give my body
Health, whose presence splendid gifts imparts.
Give lasting fame; and give that sacred care     60

That fair-haired muses, long ago, 
Gave to my pious forebears.
Add, if it please you, o, all-bestowing god,
Reward my piety with your enduring wealth;
Because the power and strength of all  65

The Universe invests your throne.
And if the whirling spindle of the fates
Spins threats and dangers from web of stars,
May your arrows, rays of light, sound through the air 
And vanquish ere it falls the coming ill. 70

Power is not held by others. Power is not held by you. Power is held by power and by the heldness of its holding as power.

I have discovered several new tools that are making my life so much easier, as I figure out new ways to organize myself for sustained period of heavy workload and more simultaneous projects than ever. Recommend them to anyone looking to recover sanity (sorry, Mac only):

• Notational Velocity/Simplenote : Great for short notes, little snippets of info that don’t belong anywhere else. License numbers, facts, reminders that you have to go back to. All the sorts of stuff that you might keep on scraps of paper or in margins of notebooks. Simplenote is actually web-based, so I am sure there are non-Mac ways to access it. There are also apps for iOS and for Android, so you achieve ubiquitous capture. It seems simpler and more straightforward that either Evernote (great for higher-fidelity saves like web pages and annotations, or meeting notes, less so for short formats) or Springpad. Free
• TrackTime: Shows you which applications you are using, which web pages you have been on and for how long, and which music you have been listening to, all displayed on a timeline. You can also define projects and time your work on them, and run stats on your time usage. Great way to see things about how you spend your time that you may actually not realize. License required
• Time Out: Interrupts you at specified intervals to take a short break by fading out your screen. You define the interval and length of time. It also reminds you to take longer breaks. I have mine set to 15 second breaks to stretch and look away from the screen, and then a 10 minute break to think, process, etc. every hour. Still adjusting the timings to get it right. Free (donation-ware).

The present era is so proud that it has produced a phenomenon which I imagined to be unprecedented: the present’s resentment of the past, resentment because the past had the audacity to happen without us being there, without our cautious opinion and our hesitant consent, and even worse without our gaining any advantage from it. Most extraordinary of all is that this resentment has nothing to do, apparently, with feelings of envy for past splendors that vanished without including us, or feelings of distaste for an excellence of which we were aware, but to which we did not contribute, one that we missed and failed to experience, that scorned us and which we did not ourselves witness, because the arrogance of our times has reached such proportions that it cannot admit the idea, not even a shadow or missed or breath of an idea, that things were better before. No, it’s just pure resentment for anything that presumed to happen beyond our boundaries and owed no debt to us, for anything that is over and has, therefore, escaped us. It has escaped our control and our maneuverings and our decisions, despite all these leaders going around apologizing for the outrages committed by their ancestors, even seeking to make amends by offering offensive gifts of money to the descendants of the aggrieved, regardless of how gladly those descendants may pocket those gifts and even demand them, for they, too, are opportunists, an eye on the main chance. Have used ever seen anything more stupid or farcical: cynicism on that part of those who give, cynicism on the part of those who receive. It’s just another acts of pride: a king or a prime minister assumes the right to attribute to his Church, to his Crown or to his country, to those who are alive now, the crimes of their predecessors, crimes which those same predecessors did not see or recognize as such all those centuries ago? Who do our representatives and our government think they are, asking forgiveness in the name of those who were free to do what they did and who are now dead? What right have they to make amends for them, to contradict the dead? Is it was purely symbolic, it would be mere oafish affectation or propaganda. However, symbolism is out of the question as long as there are offers of “compensation,” grotesquely retrospective monetary ones to boot. A person is a person and does not continue to exist through his remote descendants, not even his immediate ones, who often prove unfaithful; and these transactions and gestures do nothing for those who suffered, for those who really were persecuted and tortured, enslaved and murdered in their one, real life: they are lost forever in the night of time and in the night of infamy, which is doubtless no less long. To offer or accept apologies now, vicariously, to demand them or proffer them for the evil done to victims who are now formless and abstract, is an outright mockery of their scorched flesh and their severed heads, of their pierced breasts, of their broken bones and slit throats. Of the real and unknown names of which they were stripped or which they renounced. A mockery of the past. No, the past is simply not to be borne; we cannot bear not being able to do anything about it, not being able to influence it, to direct it, to avoid it. And so, if possible, it is twisted or tampered with or altered, or falsified, or else made into a liturgy, a ceremony, and emblem and, finally, a spectacle, or simply shuffled around and changed so that, despite everything, it at least looks as if we were intervening, even though the past is utterly fixed, a fact we choose to ignore. And if it isn’t, if that proves impossible, then it’s erased, suppressed, exiled or expelled, or else buried. And it happens, one or the other of those things happens all too often because the past doesn’t defend itself, it can’t. And so now no one wants to think about what they see or what is going on or what, deep down, they know, about what they already sense to be unstable and mutable, what might even be nothing, or what, in a sense, will not have been at all. No one is prepared, therefore, to know anything with certainty, because certainties have been eradicated, as if they were contagious diseases. And so it goes, and so the world goes.

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear.

This novel is full of stunning and elegant digressions like this, and I’m completely captivated by it.