I finished reading The Kreutzer Sonata today. There are certainly some objectionable, outmoded and frankly wrong views in it, but there is also a thoroughly heavy whack of unflinching insight into the human condition. A treat to read.

An acute awareness of the intrinsically bestial nature of man, of the impossibility of reconciling the beast with the rational.

Of particular resonance with me was Tolstoy's confrontation of the way we willfully blind ourselves to our dual nature, to the misery it means to be a thinking animal, driven fundamentally by base carnal desires filtered through a conscious self that reifies the animal desires under the guise of love, marriage and family life. We keep ourselves busy with school and jobs and hobbies, wrapping ourselves in a fog so that we can never stop to truly apprehend how much of what we are is actually driven by the animal within us.

It's the salvation as well as the punishment of human beings that when they're living irregular lives, they're able to wrap themselves in a blanket of fog so that they can't see the wretchedness of their situation. That's what we did. She tried to forget herself in a frantic round of concerns, always hastily attended to... We were both constantly busy.Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

It's what I'm consciously doing at the moment, running around from place to place, filling my time with reading and drawing and exhibitions and galleries, avoiding at all costs the unmediated apprehension of the contradiction that is our life and instead intellectualising it and viewing the problem through art and literature. Last year when I was left alone with my thoughts with no distractions for a couple of months the fog cleared and I felt I could clearly see the awfulness of the lies we live. Everything is motivated by selfishness. It was a very, very miserable feeling and I won't be retracing those thoughts again. I can manage to think about it only through the lens of fictional situations but not in a way that integrates my actual day to day reality. That is too much. The only salvation is the fog of keeping yourself distracted.

In town a man can live for a hundred years and never notice that he's long been dead and buried. There's never any time to study your conscience; you're busy all the time. There's business, social life, looking after your health, keeping up with the arts, attending to the health of your children, arranging their education... Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

Cheated on Les Mis with a brief dip into The Kreutzer Sonata. Not even thirty short pages in and he's already pulling out the mirror to our cognitive biases. This time it's our weakness for conflating beauty with goodness; the physical attractiveness stereotype. It's where we find ourselves believing that attractive people are more intelligent, more competent, more trustworthy and more successful than less attractive people. It's why it's so easy to deify beautiful girls, and it's why I fall in love with alarming frequency.

That evening it seemed to me that she understood everything, all I was thinking and feeling, and that all my thoughts and feelings were of the most exalted kind. Alll it really was was that silk stockinet happened to suit her particularly well, as did curls, and that after a day spent close to her I wanted to get even closer.

It is amazing how complete the illusion is that beauty is the same as goodness. A pretty woman may say the most stupid things, yet you listen, and you don't notice the stupidities, it all sounds so intelligent. She says and does things that are infamous, yet to you they seem delightful. And when at last she says something that is neither stupid nor infamous, as long as she's pretty, you're immediately convinced that she's quite wonderfully intelligent and of the very highest morality..Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata

Started a copy of a Rubens drawing having seen some of his paint studies at the Courtauld yesterday.

A lovely day in London. Went around the Courtauld and saw the beautiful Botticelli drawing exhibition. Illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, metalpoint sketches gone over with brown ink on vellum. The finest of lines, sensitive and sinuous. Very beautiful. Tried to do a copy tonight, but far too tired to be able to focus, left with another abortive attempt that I can't bear to look at.

I realise when I do these drawings that I suffer from unit bias. I tend to want to complete a drawing each day, rather than setting a longer-term goal for a larger work that will require multiple sittings. I tend to unconsciously match the size of the drawing to the size of the paper I'm working with, unless I very deliberately control myself to decouple the composition from the paper size. It's very insidious how the materials you work with influence you. Bigger sketchbooks make me draw bigger drawings, smaller sketchbooks make me focus down on what I'm doing and be more careful.

I bought some silver wire and holder to have a go at metalpoint drawing, without realising that you have to have specially prepared paper. Attempting to draw with silver on untreated paper results in no marks being made except scratches. You have to coat the paper with a surface that will abrade the silver to leave the mark. Apparently you can do this with a couple of coats of gouache mixed with chalk, so I'll give it a go when I'm around my paints next. Frustrating though, as I wanted to do start a careful copy of one of Leonardo's exquisite silverpoint portraits. These would be the kind of multi-day, controlled, thoughtful drawings that I've been lacking recently. I need the discipline back!

Without the silverpoint I resorted to charcoal for today's sketch -- another Leonardo lady with the characteristic tilt of the head and straight-line shading. Lovely to work from.

Life, the attainment of distraction, the eater of time, has successfully impinged on my day again and I have neither the time nor the energy to draw anything good. In fact, I have done probably the most deplorably sloppy, ugly, drawing yet.

Despite having plenty of time this morning to gather my reflections on Paris, I did not. Here they are at the end of a busy day in an attenuated form, diluted by time and tiredness.

• No place left for the artist, the creator of the new, the seeker of perfection
• The best you can hope to do is equal the skill of an earlier artist
• The question becomes "what has not been done before?". What variable can I tweak to stand out? Do I make it more abstract, change the materials, combine styles, or what? What is left that can be new?
• Even if you attained excellence at representational art, you would not be breaking new ground
• The same with less representational art. The whole spectrum of artistic endeavour seems to have been mapped. What new discoveries can be made?
• There are only a finite number of artists that we can keep in our minds at any one time. Only a finite number we can devote our attention to, and call 'great artists'. Every decade longer that humanity survives is another decade of art to fill up museums and gallery space. In a thousand years, what works will be left? Will we have space for the second-rate, the merely very-good? Only those pieces that are milestones in the development of art, or are precious by their antiquity or rareness will command any attention. Everything else will be lost to oblivion.
• The same for literature
• So then we are left with the process of creating art as the valuable thing, not the artefact that is produced but the process itself. The pursuit of a goal, the channelling of thought, the honing of a skill. These are good in and of themselves, not for the product they create. The real product is you; a happy, fulfilled, striving, seeking, trying, thinking, active, creating you.

Another pen and ink drawing because I am being lazy and they are quick. One of Leonardo's grotesques, with all of the penmanship and anatomy lost in my version.

I'm back in Cambridge now. Sad to leave Paris. This morning I spent a couple of hours at the Musee d'Orsay, far too little time. Had a lot of thoughts and emotions, and will collect them here tomorrow.

With all the travelling and rushing about I've only been able to muster up the energy for a 20 minute sketch, this time a Rembrandt pen and ink. Another deplorable attempt.

Two weeks in Paris is insufficient. My last night here, then back to England tomorrow afternoon.

I'm about halfway through Les Misérables, which like everything I have been reading recently is absolutely first class, a pleasure to read.

Another little self-portrait. Why is it so long? Why doesn't it look like me? I can never control all of the variables. Why can't I allow myself to concentrate more?

Another day of living, not contemplating. Lots of walking the city, not much energy left for drawing. Small self portrait as couldn't bear the thought of another lacklustre copy.

Life, in the ineluctable form of Parisian cafés and idle conversation interrupted my art and literature binge. I was obliged to make tonight's little drawing at a rather advanced hour when I would much rather be in bed. I have no grand or lofty thoughts to record.