Suspended in a mystic delirium

Here are some of the questions I have. How content should I aim to be? How discontent? What is the proper balance and how is it to be managed?

How aggressive should I be in seeking out new experiences? In challenging myself? How much should I hope to accomplish?

How fragile should I strive to be? How efficient, how dreamy, how routine? What depth of engagement with others should I hope to achieve? Why have friendships become so difficult?

What is life's richest possible template, and how bad should I feel if it doesn't suit me? Assuming that everyone has their own richest possible template, how do I go about finding my own?

If you could only get to the center of all questions, then the questions themselves would vanish and you'd be left hanging there, suspended in a mystic delirium.

The Saint: The True Story of How One Man's Search for Virtue Led to the Brink of Madness, by Oliver Broudy, raises these questions and many, many more. And it's as much the author's meditation on these issues, his dissatisfaction with the statusphere of New York City, as it is the story of a crazy man, a rich man with good intentions, who collects Gandhi memorabilia. With a bit about Gandhi thrown in for good measure.

I connected with this memoir right from the epigraph, which comes from one of my very favourite books (The Razor's Edge, W Somerset Maugham), a passage beginning thusly: "You're not altogether stupid. As a matter of fact, you sound like a very religious man who doesn't believe in God."

Lots of questions. Really good questions.

This too shall pass

I don't sleep well of late.

I spent the start of my week in the arms of Morpheus, in hospital bed with a kidney stone. I don't recommend the experience. There are easier ways to get a day off work. Although, morphine is pretty spectacular, rolling through your body in waves, rendering each segment heavy, limp, unencumbered. Weighty and weightless at the same time.

By chance, I am fortunate to be back in touch with a dear, dear friend of my adolescence. We were going to write poetry, change the world, dance however we damn well pleased. I've missed her.

I received a complimentary copy of The Saint, by Oliver Broudy, the recounting of days he spent travelling with a very charismatic man who happened to be very rich and a collector of Gandhi memorabilia, only he's not just a collector, he's a spiritual disciple, and this leads to all kinds of moral paradox: cuz there's this tension between means and ends, he's a rich man helping the poor; and it makes for a fascinating study of where ego fits in the world, and the tremendous ego required to achieve complete self-erasure; and it brings to the forefront the audacity, the crazy logic, of forsaking the value of actual individuals for some principle of greater good.

It's quite a compelling tale, and very thoughtful, and thought-provoking, and I expect I'll have a bit more to say about it yet. Among other nuggets: "age is the bitter process by which we gradually learn to aim low."

I'm suspended in this mood where I have to believe that this confluence of events holds some significance. That this stone in me is the detritus of gritty reality, that I will filter a new reality from my experience.