Lights

Then birds flew up as if in showers, I followed them with my eyes and saw how high they soared in one breath, till I felt not that they were rising but that I was falling . . .

—Franz Kafka, "Children on a Country Road"

• Read comparatively few books this year.  It feels wrong.
• Current excitement in my life is planning a 2014 reading list.  (nothing pathetic about that)
• Can we not talk about school, ever, ever again? 
• Electronica.  Kafka.  See the connection.
• "Above all, don't lie to yourself." * 
• "Live not by lies." **
• Joseph Conrad's birthday today. 
• Razumov lingered in the well-lighted street. He was firmly decided. Indeed, it could hardly be called a decision. He had simply discovered what he had meant to do all along. And yet he felt the need of some other mind's sanction.
  With something resembling anguish he said to himself—
  "I want to be understood." The universal aspiration with all its profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he could open himself.
• Do I understand him? - did he understand me?  (which comes first?)
• . . . and holding fast to the ropes began to swing a little out of sheer weakness. Soon I was swinging more strongly as the air blew colder and instead of soaring birds trembling stars appeared.

* Dostoyevsky
** Solzhenitsyn