online: 2 january 2005
modified: 2 january 2005

1 january 2005 readings for the new year

(difficult, fascinating, perhaps promising)




0:06 ...tired, but unable to sleep, i read parts of Immanuel Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics* (chosen by chance process for the last hour of 2004)...

This woke me up and left me with the idea that metaphysics (thoughts not derived from sensations?) are real...

and then, after midnight i began to read at least the introduction to James Joyce's Ulysses... (this book being selected by chance for this first hour of 2005)

...and now (at 00:18) i continue reading it (in a most informative and lively edition by Jeri Johnson**)...



00:53
tired again... i note that James Joyce intended Ulysses to be materialistic (anti-idealist) (page xxiv) despite it being non-realist...

...Is that why i prefer the form and presence of the book to its content?... Yes.

...And now perhaps to dream of something other (less negative, more constructive, yet equally non-realist) - a fiction not 'masking its fictiveness' (page xiii)... A recipe or resolve for 2005?


2 january 2004: contemplating this resolve - to write a connective fiction of my thoughts in a story of some kind, not pretending it to be real but making it an evident fiction (as is any myth or folk tale)... i wonder if and when and how to actually begin it... 'perhaps here and now', speaks a nameless voice driven by the thought that if this fiction does not begin soon it may never do so... you've been hesitating for decades complain the fingers and we're about to rebel...

...Once upon a time they begin writing not in the past tense but to be continued presently...




*Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, introduced by Lewis White Beck (his revision of the translation by Carus, Chicago 1902), Bobbs-Merril, New York 1950.

Kant describes the prolegomena as a 'mere sketch' of his Critique of Pure Reason (which itself, it has been said, is so difficult to understand that it should be read 'first for the fourth time'). He states that the Prolegomena should be read as a sequel to the Critique.

**James Joyce, Ulysses, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1993. This is a (slightly altered) reprint of the original 1922 edition with its many errors uncorrected but free of further errors that were introduced (by accident or intention) into subsequent editions.




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