“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
Plato
Thursday
I have been back at the gym for three days. I feel so much better.
I have not gained weight—a deceptive conclusion. The muscle mass I have lost is significant. Age certainly plays a role yet is never an excuse. If you don’t use it, you lose it, is literal in this instance.
I have been here before, I know what needs to be done.
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates
I am craving alcohol. Wine is on my mind.
I am not sleeping well. It is not jet lag, the time difference is only a couple of hours. For the first time in four weeks I am trying to fall asleep sober.
Meal time is the hardest. I think about beer when I have lunch. I think about wine when I have dinner. Also, around 4.00 pm when we had our pre-dinner bottle. The cravings strike around 2.00 pm when we had our post-lunch bottle.
“I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.”
Chuck Palahniuk
Friday
“If I thought that what I’m doing when I write is expressing myself, I’d junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.”
Susan Sontag
I finished two books this week—Illness as a Metaphor by Susan Sontag and Larry McMurtry’s The Streets of Laredo.
Streets of Laredo is a great read that captures all the falsity and romanticism of the cowboy life. What spoils the book is that it is part of the Lonesome Dove series. It stands alone as a great novel and is diminished in the attempt to use characters that were beautifully put to rest in Lonesome Dove.
“There was no degree of competence that would assure anyone of survival, and no scale that would tell a commander which man would live and which man would die.”
Larry McMurtry
There are several novels of McMurtry I could tackle for my fifth novel. The Last Picture Show appears to be a beautiful novel. I have decided to go with his autobiography written by Tracy Daugherty.
I have never read a biography before.
I read two books at once-one fiction and one non-fiction.
Sontag often referred to Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Weis. This led me to consider Sartre as my next series of books. I quickly realised that Kafka and Nietzsche influenced Sartre, who he often refernces.
Kafka refers to Søren Kierkegaard who refers to Kant and on it goes.
So I have decided to start at the beginning, which seems the best place to begin.
Plato. I will start with The Republic.
“good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”
Plato
Gym in the morning and then a lazy day of reading.
Saturday
“Do you know what it means to be heartbroken?…It means your heart isn’t whole, so you can’t really do anything wholeheartedly.”
Larry McMurtry
Gym. Breakfast.
Last night we watched The Last Picture Show. Based on McMurtry’s third novel and released in 1971. It was directed by directed by Peter Bogdanovich and starred Jeff Bridges and Cybil Shepherd.
I am not a film buff, but something is entrancing about these old dramatic films. Relying entirely on dialogue and mise-en-scène to create mood and draw the viewer.
“You have to remember that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t realize you’re cold, but you are…
Larry McMurtry
I have put my headphones through the wash after the gym. Being mad at yourself is a pointless exercise. I am all about pointlessness right now.
“He had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more.”
P. G. Woodhouse
Issue 144 of New Philosopher has just been released. I kill an entire morning reading.
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds”
Aldo Leopold
By some miracle, my headphones are still working.
Sunday
“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
Voltaire
I always feel guilty I don’t get to the gym.
Sunday is always a rest day. Training six days straight is the limit of my body. If I don’t take the break, after about day ten I start getting injuries I don’t recover from.
I know this, yet I still feel guilty. Especially when it is the week back.
It is compounded today knowing we are taking a friend out for lunch. Today the calorie deficit will be blown completely. If I just went to he gym I might mitigate the excess calories, at least limit the damage.
I know this is a long game, and one meal, one day, doesn’t matter.
I have always been this way. All or nothing.
I can spend four weeks eating and drinking to excess with no thought of the gym and my health. Not a moment’s reflection on guilt or remorse.
And here I sit consumed with shame because I am going out for lunch and not hitting the gym to compensate for a lunch with a friend.
“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
Oscar Wilde
Lunch done. I ate a lot but didn’t shame myself.
I am rethinking my reading list. Adopting a similar approach to my fiction list that I have applied to the philosophy list.
20th-century American authors. I keep Hemingway on the list, but I will start with Jack London.
Read and bed.
Shell has work tomorrow.
“The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis.”
Umberto Eco