In random snatches I've been reading The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates. I've also been reading (haven't for a few days now though) John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies. And I have been reading Boccaccio's Decameron in a sort of King James English translation. Oh...and finally...I think...I have begun reading Joyce's Ulysses, but I think I might quit that for now and read some of his earlier work first.

As it turns out I haven't read any philosophy (the subject I'm supposedly interested in) for a good week now. But I have done some writing on my other blog--about the whole business of truth; it is more of a business than one might like to admit--but that ultimately leaves me wondering about my ability to really come up with something to say that is somehow interesting. I'm not even thinking about novel ideas, but at least novel ways of explaining old ones. Honestly, all that I have said leaves me feeling empty. All the philosophy I've ever read (most of it anyway) leaves me feeling empty. Especially the very analytical stuff that one has to read like a math text: not really getting at the issues of life, just beating around the bush perpetually, never coming to grips with the real question of existence. All of that stuff really sets my stomach to churning, because of it's elegance but utter futility.

Perhaps this is why I have taken to reading more literary matter: each time I have done so, I feel like the writer is actually getting somewhere trying to see something of value in the existential quagmire, whereas the analytical philosophers are just making some crude line drawings, which are like so much dried excrement on the walls of Dante's bolgia.

How, or when, does one know? I am not posing a philosophical question here, because the lack of an answer is the horror of not knowing, of fragmentation, of being left to drift in this world of clocks and dollars, not the mere lack of a theory. Philosophy cannot even begin to detect this result of not answering the question. You can build some theoretical framework in order to write some book on epistemology, but will you really live in that system? You cannot live in a theoretical framework. "Oh, but there is the application of the system!" cries the obstinate professor as if life were like so much science that yields to a mathematical treatment--so much applied mathematics! so much delusion.

There is beauty in the cryptic statements of Confucius et al and even in those of Wittgenstein; never really putting into a formula just what they are saying (if they do it's just as cryptic as what they've said already). There is a sort of character in never quoting a thesis, like a notebook whose pages are comfortably worn, and whose words are all written in fits of inspiration, instead of dogged persistence in worship of some god--efficiency, completeness, clarity, application, production.