The Limit of Pleasure
A man who ate bread and water called himself a hedonist and meant it precisely. What he had discovered was that pleasure has a ceiling, and that nearly everyone spends their life climbing past it toward nothing.
03Writing
Writing
Prose, written for its own sake. Not an argument to be won or a study to be checked — pieces meant to be read slowly and not much else.
Three Fifteen in the Morning
Perspective is a choice. It is also the most convenient thing a man can believe at three in the morning, and the honest version is harder than the comfortable one — because the question of whether it was worth it cannot be answered by the person who paid.
Ephemeral Grace
The rain does not fall for you. The window makes a stage of what was never a performance — and everything on the other side of the glass is engaged in the same work, which is not beauty but change.
Rethinking Past, Choosing Perspective
An entry written at 3:15 in the morning, and the answer it took me two and a half years to be able to write.
The Light of Many Worlds
A note on how these were made
I wrote these three pieces in 2015, in jail, serving a year for one gram of mushrooms.
What I had was a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a great deal of time.
The method came out of boredom and turned into something else. I would go through the thesaurus and pull out every word I found beautiful. Not useful. Beautiful. I'd build a list of a hundred or more. Then I'd take one word and hunt for another word on the list that, held up next to it, started a sentence forming in my head. I'd write that sentence down and cross both words off. Each word got used once, and only once. When the list was spent I had pages of sentences that belonged to nothing at all.
Then I'd assemble them like a puzzle. Sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into an order, moving them around until the thing started telling me what it wanted to be.
I did not decide what these were about. I found out.
So they were written backwards. Words first, then sentences, then paragraphs, and the meaning came last, arriving on its own, after everything else was already standing.
They appear here exactly as they were made. Some of the word choices are strange, and they are strange because of the method — a word was chosen for its beauty and then a sentence was built to hold it, rather than the other way around. Correcting those choices now would remove the only surviving evidence of how any of this was done.
One line in Ne Plus Ultra says there is no place outside the mind in which the mind cannot control its emotional perception and response.
I want to be clear that I was not being poetic.
Crimson Blush
A walk into the Wildwood at dusk, a garden at moonrise, and the woman who brought me back down to earth.
Ne Plus Ultra
Thought precedes all form. On the will, on self-reliance, and on the divinity a man keeps searching for everywhere except inside himself.
Phantasmagoria
Nature as the consummate artist, the elements as her chisel, and the discovery that heaven was never a destination.