I just can't concentrate on academics now, for obvious reasons. Over the short Thanksgiving vacation, I have experienced intimacy. Compared to this concrete thing that has happened to me, subject to the persuasions of chance and misfortune, all the words in all the books in the world seem to have no more weight than the poignant and weighty proclamations of a Euripides when balanced against Aeschylus' master phrases. I want to live! I want to experience the companionship of men, my fellows, and all varieties tangible and intangible of love eternal and transient. What attention can a book command, why should I listen to the pasty white lips of dead men mutter incoherent lies? And why should I write, adding to this pile of debris and dust, if it will not bring me closer to the people, to those I love and desire? Sex has re-entered the world and shines in such dazzling radiance that my eyes are blinded now to those dank and tenebrous obscurities that so long held my soul in thrall. I want to walk down the streets, I want to sing, I want to dance, I want to do anything that is not inside, that is not subject to the tyrannies of artificial light and strained eyes! What foul humor persuaded me for so long that all goods are insubstantial and intangible? What wicked devil had me sell the world for a stoic God? I believe nothing of those lies that are recorded in the long, thick scrolls of the legislators, the outgrowth of diseased minds impoverished by desert storms and volcanic eruptions! The first man to drink Achaean wine wrote more purely and truly, more freely and exuberantly than perhaps even the supposed Solomon of the Song of Songs! Which must be about a woman, which must be about holding and procreation and orgasm and not about some remote and perfect God and exile! Rashi and Maimonides, even Plato, even Aristotle, what have you done to me? Can I never shake off your shackles? Can't I live and die? It is life that is precious, life! And every moment spent indoors in the confines of those demons is wasted! Study Torah! This is the world, not Torah! There is no God of revelation, there is no God of man, there is only this, the truth of life and the darkness of death.