Day 0441

Worked on my painting, not improving it and instead making it look like a mask. At least I was listening to The Count of Monte Cristo, which is transporting me away from my own grotty non-existence very effectually. I'm particularly intoxicated by the continual thread of Orientalism, which I've never really been interested in before. Seeing the North Africans in the market here (one bloke in particular, dark crinkle-creased skin, blue eyes) has continually cast my mind beyond the confines of Europe and I can see myself falling prey to romantic exoticising tendencies.

Walked aimlessly around the city because it was sunny. Watched documentaries on the art of Egypt, intoxicated by it. Have half a mind to go and have a look, but I want to have someone to share it with.

City pullulating with people, allegedly all thinking, feeling creatures with separate lives that are going on as fully, completely, richly as anything I have ever experienced, every single one of them. No way to imagine even one other mind completely, all that can be done is to model a wretchedly incomplete representation, to guess, to group, to stereotype and to merge. And still there is a never-ending torrent of people! Incomprehensible! What a dread surge of humanity sluices around on all sides, unknown and unknowable! And how horrid a deep we the living float on, an abyss of the numberless dead, forgotten souls beneath us and all about, inseparably close, just one eddy or swirl of chance away from darkest obscurity and profound oblivion. It is too miserably vast, too horribly undifferentiated, gloomy and run-together to leave anything to hold on to.

Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water -- John Keats