📚 24 - August
I fell behind several months on this blog and will update it now in one go as 2024 comes to a close. I read these books in Utah, from the bookshelf in the living room.
Carlo Rovelli (2017). The Order of Time (trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell)
This is a book finally about equations, and squaring our intuitions with those equations. What is the true nature of time? Unfortunately too much——time——has passed and I can't recall the exact learnings from the book. I had a sense of it pointing to some behind-the-veil mechanisms of time, but not giving me any information that changed my world or reoriented my engagement to the everyday.
When I was a child, I remember having a sense of time being inescapably cyclical—I suspected that each year was an exact repetition of the year before (down to the gestures, incidences, emotions, thoughts). I was frustrated that I couldn't remember the past well enough either to corroborate or to refute that suspicion and that I couldn't formulate my questions about it in a way that elicited answers.
Matsuo Bashō (1689). Backroads to Far Towns (trans. Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu)
I have a better understanding of the haiku having read this poetical diary. The seasons, the rhythm of country festivals, nature, the self, incidences of personal life—they meld into one another, echo each other, and are thrown into relief by each other. Friends are met and parted from, gifts received, illnesses abided, terrain tramped over. Coincidence, assonance, those threads through life, are honored as they arise.
Basho was doing what I was doing at the time of reading—extended travel, seeing old friends.
"Future seemed further off than ever, and recurring illness nagged, but what a pilgrimage to far places calls for: willingness to let world go, its momentariness, to die on the road, human destiny, which lifted spirit a little, finding foot again here and there, crossing the Okido Barrier in Date."
Travel feels the same now. Of course—why wouldn't it?
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