“The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
Cormac McCarthy
Thursday
Another week done.
I finished Stella Maris earlier this week. The novel is the companion work for The Passenger for obvious reasons. The Passenger focuses on Bobby Western and the story of his sister is the constant thread that winds its way through the novel.
Stell Maris is the story of Alice, Bobby’s sister, and tells her story through a series of interviews with a psychologist as she draws nearer to her suicide at Stella Maris.
It is great storytelling, if a little heavy on mathematics, and McCarthy has created a character in Alicia that is equal to Suttree, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham.
“If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?
Cormac McCarthy
It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.”
Stella Maris completes the McCarthy reading list. Apart from a handful of screenplays, I have now read his entire catalogue.
“So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall.”
Cormac McCarthy
I have moved on to the Lonesome Dove series by Larry McMurtry. The first in the four book series is Dead Mans Walk.
I am still wading through Consciousness Explained by Dennett. I am not going to lie, I will be happy to see the back of it.
Friday
“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
Franz Kafka
Shell has been under the weather these last few weeks.
She is not sick enough to miss work, but not her best self.
This morning she comes to the gym for the first time in a week.
After breakfast, she joins me for grocery shopping.
She slides her arm into mine, leans her head on my shoulder and says
Flex your bicep.
Wow, they have gotten small.
You need to work on that.
Rachelle Griffin
We head home for another financial meeting.
Shell opts out, these discussions bore her.
I can’t say I am a fan myself.
We now seem sorted with some kind of managed fund.
“You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you’re fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal”
Martin Amis
I spend the day reading.
Saturday
“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”
Fernando Pessoa
I fell asleep at 7.00 last night without telling Shell I loved her.
This morning she is angry, demanding an apology and threatening divorce.
Standard.
We hit the gym and have breakfast.
It is already 34 degrees outside and I sit down after breakfast and think about what I should do today.
And there is nothing to do but read and listen to music.
Three day weekends are entirely pointless if you have nothing to do.
“The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.”
Albert Camus
I head down for a haircut.
Sunday
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
Groundhog Day
It’s Sunday, again.
I make my lunches for next week.
I wonder what the people who have lived here for years do on weekends in the hot season.
Over 105 million people visited the Dubai Mall in 2023. Is that what they do? Go to the mall?
The pools are empty because the water is bath warm.
I am thankful for the cool season so I can go outside and walk around my industrial estate. Or drive to the mountains and walk in the sand and rocks. Endless vistas of sand without a shrub in sight.
A goat. A camel.
We have started watching a TV show called Sugar starring Colin Farrell. It is very good so far.
So there it is, another Sunday reading with a refreshing change of pace. Watching a TV series.
“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you.”
Andy Warhol
But I have her, and that makes everything ok.
Because without her, I would lose my mind here.
When I see these pictures I regret leaving my old Nikon in Kuala Lumpur. It had a wonderful fixed 40mm f1.4 Zeiss lens and I have never had a camera take better photos.
If I had it here, maybe I could read books, listen to music and take more and more photos of her.
And yet there are no pictures that can capture everything she is.
“As for you girls, you must risk everything for Freedom, and give everything for Passion, loving everything that your hearts and your bodies love. The only thing higher for a girl and more sacred for a young woman than her freedom and her passion should be her desire to make her life into poetry, surrendering everything she has to create a life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in her imagination.”
Roman Payne