Wednesday, a rainish day, tough much of it spent out of doors, wandering about: the precicely controled narrative of Die totale Familie from Heimito von Doderer read all morning had for chief effect that of needing to be set loose in a kind of desultory vagrancy. During the course of which I came back, as I do often enough, on the impossibility for me of any real life outside philosophy. I mean of any existence in which the subject does not assume the proportions of the world reflected back into him, a life free from the static false projections which strangle thought and lead to resignation, cynicism, skepticism, despair really. Literature and art do set apart, put aside indefinately the claims of the more allluring or uncomfortable (the world of feelings, the difficult past, death) aspects of our life, relegates them to a shadow existence where they cease to bother us effectively. So really all literature affords us is just that: the "living" out of a seductive but shadow existence. The philosophical text should engage the whole self and possibly that means much of the subconscious self as well. It is all precence and a bit dangerous. Anything that hightens the awareness of reality, the perception of a hyperreality must come out of something greater than the conscious intention of reflecting the world within the old logic of an existing conceptual horizon. This is a process that creates a lot of room in the self somehow, expands, releases energy held in old deep rooted mental structures.