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the
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I’ve started regarding myself as someone who is learned. Not educated or intelligent but learned. So I took my book with me to a nearby university campus and sat on the base of a column of the central university library. Central is what I think they call these libraries that are at the center of institutions where one might become learned or at least where some amount of the contagion that is learnedness might be caught, cultured, and spread throughout the body. While I sat and read my book it began to rain and the students who I would have considered ‘passers-by’ in one of the following sentences had it not rained began to huddle beneath the shelter provided by the library (a metaphor for learnedness if there ever was one). I became distracted by the feeling that something had got a hold of me. My mind started to remind itself of previous interests—Goethe, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Stendhal—and then it delved even further to understand what made it remind itself of its previous interests—restlessness, boredom, dissatisfaction—and then even further to understand why restless? why bored? why dissatisfied?—and then even further to understand why it needed to understand why. And then I saw the girl who I saw at 6th and i historic (if only briefly) and who interrupted my delving (and further interrupted my reading), pass through the crowd of students who had begun to disperse as the rain let up. She departed into that institution of learnedness (learnedness is a departure with no arrival) and I thought it was not possible that we could ever meet so long as I desired to be learned. But I desired to be learned and accepted the fact that she and I could only ever ‘meet’ as two people passing by each other--possibly unaware of this passing by--from time to time as we wandered along our separate paths.
what i was reading at the central library 2/28/2014:
R
rememory
Starting with the trees. Starting with the path leading to the trees. The trees were tall in the forest. She turned to look back. Slowly mon ami. And the leaves? They fell did they not? So many. So many fell around her. And then she turned again. Slowly. My god she turned. So slowly, so full of grace, that we mistook her for air.
It’s no small feat to make one’s way. It requires an understanding of the metaphysics between one’s self and the objects that orbit one’s self. It would have been no surprise to Molly and her objugates if she had awakened one morning and wished for a kind of normal that comes without explanations. But Molly’s normal came with an urgent request for the revolver.
