As noted elsewhere, I went to the beach for a while. It was lovely. C and I periodically discuss moving out to the coast when we’re older, and it’s definitely appealing. Portland sometimes seems like an unhappy medium to me between a dramatic urban environment like New York and a dramatic natural environment like you find along the Pacific here or in the ancestral homeland.
Unsurprisingly, my aspiration to get through The Past Regained in short order trailed off pretty dramatically. I have gotten to the crux of the biscuit (cookie/whatever) as discussed in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” and it’s pretty cool. In another Proust/Benjamin connection that I hadn’t been aware of before, one section of reflection concludes “the task of the writer is the task of the translator.” He also mounts what is, as far as I know, history’s first attack on hipsters, wherein he bitches about people who listen to music primarily to gush about how much they love it in an attempt to appear sensitive and artistic.
I have been doing a lot of writing. Some of this has been your standard hand-on-forehead diary fare, but I’ve also been trying to do a better job of keeping my random thoughts in some kind of repository, mostly so I can see if any of their threads intersect or if I’m going through certain topics at an interval cycle that prevents new instances from building on old ones. I’d say that this latter project is too new to know if it’s effective, but it does seem as if it’s clearing internal clutter, which is always nice.