Second missed Mass of the octave. Alarm clock on the fritz. In fairness, the disciples were awol for a good part of the first week of their own historical epoch, if memory serves.
I will make it to a neutral country, and work, read, think, and write.
And until then, imagination will have to serve: Hic Rhodus. With grace, the imagination will outlast the circumstance.
My place is now with Beckett and Cioran. To return to the easygoing (and greedy and vicious, at the drop of a hat) norm of the people who grew up inside of bubbles in the prosperity would be a betrayal of life. Omnis homo mendax. And yet, it is possible to think, and perhaps there are a few righteous ones still around.
I discovered Cioran on the last trip, although he appears to still very much be in the academic canon here. Not all of his works, of course. If there were a bit more distance between the powers that be here and the powers that be there, I would really be looking at northern Romania (he lived near Sibiu, apparently just outside Rasinari, and his father taught at the seminary in Sibiu) as a place to work and think.
But these things will be decided by the event, not by my extravagant planning.
When the window opens, shoot an arrow, and then follow it.
Orthodox pascal mysteries approach. I'm certain that these cultures have their own corruption, but I'm grateful for a vantage on the event that isn't looking through the corruption here. The church belongs to the world, and is subject to its corruption, but this is so to allow it to preserve the sacraments within time.
And on earth, peace to those of goodwill. Second half of the rather important message that arrived from the other world that night. #roadsidepicnic
I've abandoned the second Knausgaard -- it got a bit blue about 250 pages in, but a very skillful writer. Foregrounds the moral circumstance as clearly as Tolstoy. I had the same problem with things getting blue with the most recent Sororkin. It's not an objective call -- I slog through the blue in Pynchon and elsewhere, but I just get a sense of when the writer has moved the train onto the spur, and I hop off and find another. (This sort of real-time route-changing between unknown trains can be exhilarating in vivo when travelling on second-class rail in Romania, as I found about a year ago.) Perhaps I'm a stick in the mud. Or the pond.
Onward. I await the event.