"Enivrez Vous!", said Baudelaire, on wine or poetry or virtue...

Ah, bliss. Just finished Brave New World, and embarked on Motorcycle Diaries... ooh the forgotten pleasure of having the leisure to spend days and nights immersed in someone else's world or mind. I didn't realize till about a week ago just how much I had missed having this kind of control over my life - my time is completely mine to do with as I please, and my sweet, bewildered Dad doesn't know what to say when I sleep at five and wake up at two, and wander around with my nose permanently glued to a book. Its a relapse into a Condition they thought they had completley cured me of. I mean, there I was, for the last three years, out in the big, bad world all by myself, actually socialising and stuff (relatively speaking). But they failed to realise that it is moments or times like that which are my vacation from the serious daily business of ... well reading seems too inadequate a word... it doesn't quite express the all-consuming frenzy, the rapturous transportation, the ex-stasis - the out-of-body experience of it all. I suppose the little death could be a workable metaphor, the hormonal push towards; the biological drive for more than survival, for connection, affirmation of your status as self-described homo sapien sapiens; the relentless pursuit of that known and yet elusive and constantly surprising telos - which dangles at the tail of every venture, unseeable, impalpable, but reassuringly undeniable through precedent. A bitter-sweet end most of the time - one craves, simultaneously, the reprieve from something too demanding on our resources, while also dreading the end of feeling so intensely, painfully, real and alive. Oh, that this too too weary flesh...