Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.
Recently I watched R.C. Waldun's How to Keep a Commonplace Book on YouTube so I went ahead and bought a new notebook at the store to serve as a repository for all of my notes on things that I read that don't fit squarely into philosophy. Unfortunately, I had already made this website and it didn't occur to me until a month later that I could simply make a new section on my website really easily to accomodate these things and now I accidentally made all of my nice stationery supplies and notebooks obsolete. Hence, I decided to rename the journal section of my website to my commonplace to fit with its new usage. New sections will be added whenever I deem it necessary and some weird decisions might be made like putting non-fiction books that aren't philosophy into the literature section since the fiction/non-fiction distinction is more of an Anglosphere thing. Maybe in the future when I start reading screenplays again I'll make a new section for selections and notes from those, might use it to jot down quotes from anime and TV shows I watch as well. I'm hoping this commonplace book will help me develop as a writer and give me plenty of material to work with and fiddle with.
Other than that, I recently got a big order in for a bunch of physical philosophy books that I wanted to add to my collection since I really don't have that many primary texts in my library. It'll probably conflict a little with my recent desire to start reading more fiction alongside philosophy and I'm glad I added that new section so I can start going back and forth to hopefully make some decent progress this year. I'll also at some point be digging through my bookshelf to find books I've read that I underlined and bracketed heavily and start adding those to my commonplace as well so I can grab selections and quotes when I need them. My hazy writing aspirations seem to be glued to the idea of writing short stories, mostly because I'll feel less guilty about asking a friend to read a short story than having to ask them to read an entire 300 page novel. So, I plan to undertake a study of many different short story writers, I'm particularly excited about James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa. As a strange side project, I also want to read all of the books
in Skyrim like Brian David Gilbert to hopefully give me decent material to work with in writing very short fantasy stories of maybe 3,000-5,000 words.
As far as my philosophy studies are going, soon I'll go ahead and get all my selections from Spinoza's Ethics uploaded when I have some free time for it. I decided I'm going to read Miguel Leon-Portilla's Aztec Thought and Culture and I'll be uploading notes from those as well as I go along. I'm excited for quite a few of the things I got in the mail as well, like A Comparative History of Philosophy and Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Soon I'll also want to read Kalkavage's The Logic of Desire and upload selections from that too. I got Kojeve's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel as well and those should pair nicely with a second re-reading of the Phenomenology. I have more than enough things on my plate and it's as frustrating as it is exciting, but I hope to slowly chip away at everything I've decided to seek out and use this website as a tool to iteratively and cumulatively build upon everything I've studied in the past (albeit a bit more haphazardly).
I don't know when I'll get around to posting argumentative essays on this website, I think I'm still a bit far off from that kind of capability, and I don't know when I'll be able to upload my own fiction writings when I get something out of the 2nd or 3rd draft. Slow but steady progress is the name of the game. That's all I have this time, signing out for the night! As a final aside, I credit this website for helping me navigate my quarter life crisis.