Study mathematics as a pretext for doing nothing.
This came to me after turning the ground over for the garden, the small flower garden for The Mother, that is, not the garden that is quite a long walk from the unit, the community garden where we are permitted to grow tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers.
Anyway, I guess I am really out of shape. I get physically tired quickly. I'm not the worker I used to be. Far from it. I have become shamelessly lazy, as a matter of fact.
So, when I go to lay back down on the floor where I had left the textbook, the notebook, the pencils, and eraser, I experienced such a relaxed feeling, and I understood that my study of mathematics does not have to serve some kind of purpose. In fact, having a purpose might just ruin it for me, making it feel like work.
Maybe that is what appealed to me about Cioran's prose. He was not trying to apologize for his character defects.
I would like to develop the courage to overcome guilt and shame.
In the animal kingdom, there is a great deal of laying around and doing nothing.
Maybe, when I lay on the floor do go through [mathematics] exercises, I want to be able to acknowledge that I am doing nothing, to actually promote this as a good thing.
Maybe I am committed to studying mathematics because I am committed to doing nothing.
Maybe I am like the fictional Ignatius Reilly from Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, with the main difference besides my being a skinny version, is that I tend to have a little more insight into my ridiculousness.
Whereas Schopenhauer took himself very seriously, I can only take myself with a grain a salt.
With all that is going on in this world, the things that I am concerned with seem rather pathetic.
I suspect that I may be not quite right in the head. Is it wrong for me to be so detached and self-absorbed? Some people escape reality with drugs. I escape reality with math.
There are those who have operation where their colon is removed. Then they have to move their bowels into a bag that is attached. Schopenhauer noted that we do not appreciate our health until it is gone.
To be blunt, we do not think to appreciate our own a-s-s-h-o-l-e-s when they are in working order.
The slightest malfunction in our physical organism can alter our entire universe in devastating ways. I suspect that this is a big part of the horror that Raul and Holden discuss, the utter vulnerability of all who are born into this world as creatures with veins and nerve endings.