Day 0320

Hibernated the morning away. Watched John Berger documentary on looking. He likes how riding a motorcycle requires complete concentration, demands you live in the moment and constantly keep looking. And so I am beginning to enjoy driving; I bob along in the fast-flowing current, unable to dwell on anything for long, reacting and evaluating and not projecting myself far into the future. A certain calm from being torn away from oneself and having attention focused outwards.

I have scarcely done a stroke of work for weeks, and I can feel myself brimming with mental energy. Reading many books simultaneously, looking at art, bathing myself in the best thoughts that have been thought. Connections fizzling in my head, nurtured by leisure and unstructured time. Vast intellectual vistas lay on all sides, crisscrossed with networks of interjoining paths, travelled before by minds of similar bent, all of us on the same happy and meandering quest.

Finished Montaigne today, who will remain a friend and a model.

Dipping into Dutton on the Art Instinct; fundamentally similair brain architecture the world over leads to convergent cultural evolution.

Montaigne discovers mindfulness from his own first principles half a millenia ago, but Buddhism had meditation a thousand years before him. It has come into vogue again with positive paychology and its reminders to attend to the present. Circles of minds forever groping towards the same conclusions, forever bounded by the same limitations and discovering the same revelations over and again.

When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.
Michel de Montaigne - Essays