I started "Being and Time" this evening. Utterly senseless -- it makes me want to cry. I thought I knew something, that I could understand things if I read them, that I was moderately educated -- there was barely a sentence that made real sense to me and I can only claim a single section honestly interested me. And yet -- Heidigger is trying to figure out what *being* *is*. I *am* -- this concerns *me* -- I should be fascinated. But I can't help but think -- it's unanswerable, it's too obscure, it's...

I've been trying to figure out what being is my whole life. I mean, what existence means, and what it means to me, and whether it means (that is to say, communicates?) at all. But...did he solve the problem? Did he give a definition for being? More words to throw around at parties, I suppose -- impress people: "I'm reading Heidigger" -- "Will you fuck me?" The utter frustration of it! To think that you can apprehend and not know what you're apprehending -- perhaps it challenges me. It definitely challenges me. It challenges me like very few things I've ever encountered; like, in fact, nothing I've ever encountered. There's always a basis for any other question, always some point to claw at, to grasp, but nothing for the question of being except being itself. I'll keep you posted. Part of me wants to put it down and never take it back up ever again. And then there will be a major work of philosophy that influenced everybody in the 20th century that I don't understand. Whatever my carreer, I am a foreigner in my own time, to my own people, well read in ancient sources but ultimately outside of the loop.

This brings me to another question that I often ask: is there anything to be gained by all this study? Beyong pleasure? Is pleasure itself reason enough? Should it bother me that I don't understand how trees work, what a tree essentially is? When a moment passes I don't know what that passing is. I am, but I don't comprehend myself. The utter exhaustion of it. And whatever I write, whatever I think, is an unformed and unthought thought, misunderstand and misapprehended, lost to all comprehension like a quick flash of light in the dark, a raging spark that burns and sputters out, or some thing -- a meaningless nothing. It distances me further from religion, from poetry, from any validation -- how can I validate anything when I understand none of it? How can I, confronted with this nothing, affirm "O youth perspicuous in bloom" when these are images in my mind, but the source, the I, is beyond me? And yet it is comforting to think I enter the illusory world of knowledge, like a dream, like a mist, and through the comparison of one thing to another, I begin to understand this nothing by dividing it, splitting it into smaller infinities, smaller nothings, and rearranging each in a pattern of nothing, and affirming, "be". So I know that bloom is the growth of a flower, a flower the growth of the spring, and spring the growth of life, which is the opposite of fall and winter, death and nothing, being that springs from the absence of being. Youth too, is life, and perspicuous is a clear and firm affirmation, one of absolute existence, and I mean an eternal existence in bloom, in becoming which is not yet nothing but the apex of a movement away from it. My experiences collaborate with each other to give me no ultimate knowing but a prediction of what knowing this being might be.