Change of direction
Joel Biroco | July 13, 2024 | Archive
I gradually became aware that the kind of stuff I started writing in this blog was leading to a new book I wanted to work on in private and they weren’t really the kinds of posts that are usual blog fare. It’s actually quite difficult to write blog posts when one has substantially given up on the world and withdrawn. Yet letting one’s writing swell a book written offline over a much longer period is a different matter.
I came across a quote by Fernando Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet today that summed up my own thoughts:
Why should I care that no one reads what I write? I write to forget about life, and I publish because that’s one of the rules of the game. (From #118)
Writing is a way to stave off insanity, and by insanity I mean as much as anything just normal life, but plunged into the depths of its abyss. The ‘abyss of birth’ Cioran called it in his Cahiers (« abîme de la naissance »), saying this was a Buddhist expression, though I’ve never seen it in a Buddhist context put like that.
Well in any case I think I will write here now the kinds of things I wouldn’t put in books.