January 2026
Citation (82)
4 January 2026, around 15.38.
When it is implicit that everything that ever happened still is, but is in a necessarily different form from what memory or record reports, there is less incentive to study the past. As for the present, the incentive would be not to record it but to treat it as “preparing.” But our objectified time puts before imagination something like a ribbon or scroll marked off into equal blank spaces, suggesting that each be filled with an entry. Writing has no doubt helped toward our linguistic treatment of time, even as the linguistic treatment has guided the uses of writing. […] Just as we conceive our objectified time as extending in the future in the same way that it extends in the past, so we set down our estimates of the future in the same shape as our records of the past, producing programs, schedules, budgets. The formal equality of the spacelike units by which we measure and conceive time leads us to consider the “formless item” or “substance” of time to be homogeneous and in ratio to the number of units. Hence our prorata allocation of value to time, lending itself to the building up of a commercial structure based on time-prorata values: time wages (time work constantly supersedes piece work), rent, credit, interest, depreciation charges, and insurance premiums.
contrivances
7 January 2026, around 4.54.
Balancing the ledger of books for the year, looking ahead. Forecasting. Looking back, the past year was a busy one for reading, and I made some headway on some of my reading ‘projects’, although calling them that perhaps honors them with too much coherence – ‘themes’ might be a better choice. 1 I usually think of them as ‘things’. Just reading things, you know?
This year, I hope to continue ambling around Spinoza (including Maimonides and more Descartes), as well as reading up a bit more on Burton and melancholy. I finally started on that global history of the Napoleonic Wars, mostly as background to Marx, but also so I can finally get back on track with Tolstoy (my poor spreadsheet of his works in chronological order has been gathering dust). Not that a knowledge of history is essential for reading historical fiction, but it adds a certain something. 2 Who knows, I might even go so far as to finally finish working my way through Montaigne – except I don’t want to be done with the essays, but would rather they went on forever. Well, there are always other translations and, failing that, the original. Perhaps I might manage to read another novel or two, but too monumental an ambition at this point in the year can but lead to ruin or disappointment or both. Time will tell.