Composition of Philosophy. July 17.

I’d better post this before the date changes, even though I plan to write a bit more before sleeping.

This won’t be the most edifying of posts, because it was a fairly flat and stale writing day until the last hour or so. There was the feeling of going through the motions, not believing things as I was typing them, and merely remembering that I usually believe them.

Days like that are inevitable. Sometimes they have obvious causes, at other times they seem to appear almost at random. The key is not to take them too seriously, because otherwise it feels like a mood that will never depart.

There are two basic options in such cases. One is to ignore it and stop trying and go do something fun to get your mind off of it, and come back with fresh eyes the next day. This will depend on your personality; in my own case, it only works if the suggestion comes from another person. In other words, if I think to myself “this isn’t working; I’m going to go for a walk/to a film/for dinner, etc.”, I just end up thinking about the writing problems the whole time, and just end up feeling like a procrastinator. But if someone else randomly happens to invite me to something at just that moment, then it usually works, and I always accept the invitation, because those feel like gifts from the gods to try to get your mind off of things.

If someone doesn’t take the initiative of inviting me to do something in those moments, then I tend to keep plugging away trying to fight through it.

Today was a bit of both. The sections weren’t going any more slowly than usual. They were just so painfully joyless that I would take extremely long breaks between each one, as opposed to the usual hour-long breaks.

Then one friend dropped by in the evening. Within a few minutes of that visit, another friend happened to call and invite me to something else for later, and that involved a leisurely shisha-smoking evening on a terrace overlooking the Nile, which was hard to refuse.

By prior agreement I limited that to a couple of hours (this friend knows what I’m up to these days) and returned home energized and things started humming again.

I’m still going to end the day a few hours behind what I planned, but you can never worry about those things. I won’t put a timetable for today because it’s all rough prose that was produced today. I didn’t think I had it in me to polish anything nice and shiny. One more rough section before sleeping will finish today’s work.

The current plan for tomorrow is to continue ahead, writing a rough version of Chapter Two, rather than polishing the current rough version of Chapter One. This would be more in keeping with my usual method. (But last night, as you may recall, the polishing was happening automatically along with the shortening, and this had me very enthusiastic about the polishing part. But that often requires a fairly happy mindset, and it just wasn’t there today, for whatever reason.)

Still, it was an exceptionally bad writing day, and I wrote 14 pages. That’s not bad for a bad day, especially since I didn’t do a thing before noon (damned night owl schedule I’m on all of a sudden). 14 pages in graduate school would have been a revolution, and now I can scrape 14 pretty good pages together while not even really wanting to do it. That’s called progress.

[ADDENDUM: Actually, it’ll be 16 or 17 pages by the time I call it a night. Even better.]