The reason for the qualitative change in these quotidian blog posts over the last several months is quite simple. It has been a time of extraordinary physical and psychological stress, due to various factors, and at times posing a real risk to survival, and it seemed wise to use this as a means of focusing the mind on its essential thoughts and intentions.
This might have seemed maudlin at times, but there is a reason for this. Romanticism and classicism have this in common: the suggestion that we should be a bit less cynical about expressions of emotion. (This is very important when training artists; they need to learn to take themselves more seriously, and less cynically.) These were heartfelt, not as expressions of emotion, but because they were mirroring a mind that was focusing on simple and important things. The sort of things those living in bubbles of prosperity their whole lives are inclined to hide beneath a cloak of irony, a practice which in turn usually becomes a class signifier.
The times are extraordinary. The world is false, both in the corrupt institutions that I've dealt with, and more generally with respect to the culture. No serious mind can look at the present government and think that it has any conceptual legitimacy as a republican government. What it is remains to be seen, likely when the force of its glamour abates a bit. But powerful forces, many of them from foreign entanglements, are making the most of it while it lasts.
But that which we are, we are. (Here, the first-person plural signifies the single person.) It is still possible to read, and think and work. Though one should avoid the society generally, as it was unwise to go around socializing during the Terror in post-revolutionary France, the halcyon days of Bolshevism in Moscow, or the first hundred days of Savonarola. The dangers of these shared ideas are considerable. Cultivate your own garden, as the fellow said. Reason will survive the time, even if many of the reasonable don't.
There is a sort of stupid happiness on the faces of most people in the city, and it concerns me. Life is serious. Even in a prosperous society largely on political autopilot vis-a-vis effective history. If no one is being serious and honest in the shared life, then something's gone wrong.
I'm obviously in a difficult place, after having tangled with some very corrupt and powerful folks, and I didn't have much of a safety net, as my family has always been involved in confidential government work, which sort of ended up tearing it apart. And it has been a rather difficult winter. For a sense of it, try sleeping on a parkbench during a blizzard with a wind chill of -10F. In the preceding autumn, I despaired completely one evening in northern Romania, when it seemed circumstances would force me back to this sort of difficult life, and the paradigm then was a prior stint, when the worst of it was dozing off during a light snowfall on a parkbench in the Village. (But still a very difficult life, and beyond the experience of those who have never been forced to it.) The last few months have been an exercise in meeting a challenge orders of magnitude larger than anticipated.
And I've kept to the discipline, without exception: intellectual, spiritual and physical. Teetotal, needless to say.
So I live, or at least it seems that I do. And while I live, it is possible to read, to think, to work, and to write. I will get back to a neutral country, but this is the time for work to the extent that the situation allows. To it.