Hard Books

So I finished that essay on nihilism. But in its wake I feel like I have very little momentum. I don't want to return to AZI. I don't have any writing projects I'm working on. Although I could see myself completing the latest section of AZI that I began (a survey of political themes in Collingwood's final five books). All I need to do is analyze The New Leviathan and explain how it implies that Collingwood's work must culminate in Clausewitzian pedagogical project.

My reading, too, is petering a bit. I am currently looking at two books. Sciller's On The Aesthetic Education of Man (Which I haven't touched in like 2 weeks), and Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, which I'm moving very slowly through.

Both of them are very challenging. Especially Schiller. Writing in 1795 as some philosopher-poet. Shit yeah that is difficult stuff. I am about halfway through (it is only 140 pages), so I should probably keep going. MacIntyre I am taking more slowly. Both of them are incredibly relevant to my thinking. But they require more patience than I seem to have lately.

A bit of restlessness has crept into my heart lately. I don't have the patience. It is more shocking than usual to encounter what Collingwood describes as "a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baffled me" (An Autobiography, 4). That is how these books are to me. Perfectly grammatical sentences that I cannot grasp. Because I'm not willing, at this moment, to put in that kind of work.

I think I'm doing sorting of another kind. I'm figuring out what is up with my heart. Because it has some fog in it. There are some problems that are only now becoming clear to me. The prospect of social and emotional reinvention is haunting me. The prospect of relocation is prodding at me. Life, and not philosophy, is waiting for me to do something else.