Today I am scheduled to meet a philosopher. I have noticed that my life is now full of people who, if they are not themselves philosophers, at least espouse philosophy. I need to read. It is reading week, after all. Their Eyes Were Watching God. I think I can finish it. And there are many admirable qualities to Zora Neale Hurston's writing. A style, shall we say, almost biblical? Far from it. But maybe biblical in compass.

Speaking of which, I just finished my essay on St. Augustine. The important thing, folks, to take from the Confessions: there are three levels of literary experience. (1) Emotional Response (the lowest); (2) Intellectual Response; (3) Truth. We respond to a work first through emotional engagement, which is vulgar because it appeals to our emotions through manipulation of an existing status quo of values without turning our mind to those values or our relationship to them; next, we can turn upon the work intellectually, which encourages consideration of morality, philosophy, and existence; finally, however, there is a level of engagement with the work in which we choose to reject Virgil's pathetic Aeneid (all of it, all of it) for the higher truth and moral order present and exemplified in the Bible. My thesis concerning The Confessions. Applies to the real world? Yes. For are we to bend the world to our liking or accept it as it really is? Flee into the arms of poetry or fight and die? All statements in which their exists a grain of truth are valid, all the beautiful lies are inconceivable corruptions not to be protected under even Keat's famous dictum. Ad finibus.

Yesterday I took a walk to NE. Two hours. It was a gorgeous day. The sun was bright, the air was clear, cars flying everywhere, people, golden statues, a high school, the grassy leaves, sitting on the Peach's porch-step for an hour just trying to remember lines of Mallarmé. Rain. I recommend it.

And so I'm off for a busy day. Music, exercise, study, conversation, scintillating thought. If there is one thing I would desire in the coming days, it would be tender embraces. It has been so long since I've shared the warmth of bodies. I need to begin praying as well more frequently.