It's morning. Presently sitting in a nearly vacant, indoor gymnasium, fully equipped with a soccer field (which is in front of me), a kid's play area (to my left), and an aerobics training area (to my right), with my back to the wall, some Japanese snack machines to my immediate left, and the occasional amplication of the surge of jet engines roaring outside, flying over, taking off, or landing. I'm nibbling off dozens of different readings, biding my time until my appointment, the specifics of which I find too insipid to mention. It's a bit uneventful this morning. It continues to be 'freezing hard' outside, a thin coat of newly fallen snow snuggly foamed over the walkway to my car and had just begun its rigor mortis into slick, slippery ice. I find the foam more aesthetically pleasing than the ice; there is the illusion of softness without the inconvenience of verifying it with the senses. Ice seems prickly even while smooth, uncompromising, rude, uncivil, monomaniacal, and even a bit boring. The whole allure of the 'ice sculpture' is that the artist has to impose on that banality a form to redeem its otherwise amorphous monotony. 

I began reading Sartre's Nausea, just to get a taste, like dipping a toothpick into an unbearably spicy hot sauce. I see what he is doing and the artistry with which he is doing it, but I'm finding in myself a tendency to organize literature relative to 'stages on my life's way' and measuring how a particular stage would have found the literature tantalizing. There are stages in my life that would have found Nausea to be a wet blanket that was welcome because I wanted to be wet, to wallow in the deepest, darkest mire of whatever my 'morbid introspection' could conjure, and keep everything and everyone behind my carefully crafted moat, constantly unfolding the ultimately unfoldable nature of my abject melancholia, seeking out authors as merely a means to the end of lending to my greedy imagination another vocabulary to describe this dreadful, inner geography. The sucking sound was relentless and disgusting even if it ever became audible. 

It's now the end of the day. About to go to bed. Read the first book of Paradise Lost, made some progress in War and Peace, Book 10, chapter 3, Popper's chapter on Plato's theory of the Forms in his Open Society, and made more progress in my response to Linford (I'm finally nearing the end). Mostly read Craig on CMC foliation and the role it plays in identifying Cosmic Time and Linford's issues with it. I almost forgot to mention that I listened to a very good analysis and summary of Nietzsche's Geneology of Morals from independent academic John David Ebert. It will never cease to amaze me why this man isn't more well-known.