If Descartes' Meditations were a longer book, it wouldn't be believable.

One of those nights where you remember every lover. Not by trying, nor not trying, just one, then another, and another.

Celan the aphorist

Showing up

'… and yet, on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, 'We have no thoughts.''

'Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The studious classes are their own victims: they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the day a fear of interruption, —pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain, —they are abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer to embody and vitalize it.'

A sudden urge to read the dictionary.

How before what, whenever you don't know why.

My approach so far to the Mulhall essay has been defined in terms of the ideas of voice and tradition. I've even been preferring, since including it in 'the book', to think of the title as 'How to give (your) voice to a tradition' rather than 'Mulhall against the anti-dogmatists'.

With the idea of myth given prominence, though, the first thing I find myself wanting to say, as it were by way of grammatical remark (without having thought anything through, including the remark), is:

We tell, retell, stories. We cannot tell myths, but only retell them.