I just got back from Egypt last Saturday, then spent a week in New York, so I promise I’ll start updating regularly again. But for now, here’s a link to some posts I did for another blog while abroad. Cheers.
Author: Brett
A former Journalism and Mass Communication major at St. Bonaventure, Brett changed his major to philosophy sophomore year.
Now, a recent graduate he's looking to continue his twin passions in writing and philosophy in whatever ways he can.
Egypt…
So… I meant to post before I left on Thursday, but I got caught up with packing and goodbyes, “tying up lose end” I called it. A few remained undone. One of them was here, so I’m getting back to it now: I’ll be in Egypt for a month teaching English with ESL/Arabic teachers to a group of seminarians.
I got here Friday and have already had some powerful impressions. Once the schedule gets more regular, I hope to post a few blurbs now and then to highlight my stay. So far, I’ve been writing them in a notebook.
I hope you excuse my absence, and I hope to repay with some interesting anecdotes. Cheers.
The Ticking is the Bomb Review
I propped open The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn while sitting on my bed in a Zen Monastery, day two of a spiritual pilgrimage. It’s an older book, coming out in 2012, but a teacher recommended it.
The day started just before 5 a.m., when some monk jangled a handful of bells outside the door. At the time, I imagined he took a sadistic joy in it.
“Hey, here’s a crammed group of exhausted travelers—how can I give a good start to the day?” he probably thought. “Loud bells!”
Rubbing my head, I greeted the others with a nod.
Night still drenched the windowpanes in reflection as we entered the meditation hall. I crossed my legs into a half-lotus and a bell pitched the space into silence, broken occasionally by the rattling radiator or the rasp of a stuffy nose.
I wrestled with my thoughts for the next hour or so. The rest of the day blurred as we moved from one lecture to another and a silent work call. I stayed in the kitchen, cracking 160 eggs for a massive casserole.
Thirteen hours after waking up, I was choking on Zen. Flynn’s tense prose challenged the backdrop of silence that permeated the day. But I needed it.
Words
Some days all I can do is cling to my art. I feel my world withdrawing, but my fingers rib red lines along words as 
they grasp and hold and strain. It’s more feeling than reality, but it keeps me moving past my insecurities. The past few days, a quote by Albert Camus has lingered on edge of my thoughts, flashing now and then into focus:
Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.
I feel heavy.
Nursing home
The nursing home smelled of stale urine and had the wallpaper of a 1970s mental home, with calm colors and a bland boarder of flowers. An elderly lady clutched a baby doll with blue eyes and a prim smile as she rolled her wheel chair down the hall.
“The baby’s smiling at you,” my uncle Matt said, pointing to the doll with a quiet chuckle.
I smiled. Televisions droned in the background, filtering into the hall from open doors and an alarm sounded.
“What do you think that alarm is?” my dad said.
“Someone probably trying to get out,” said Matt with the same quiet chuckle.
My dad nodded.
A young nurse with blond hair pulled out of the room. Without smiling she said, “All set.”
We walked inside. My grandfather smiled as he saw us enter. He wore a blue woolen cap, khakis, and a striped blue shirt. His face looked like putty molded into a face–sunken cheeks, eyes dazed, mouth loosely hanging–and his body had skin stretched taut over thin bones. He was gray and tired. I shook his hand, a vague clasp that hung in my palm.
“Hey Grampa, nice to see you,” I said.
Travel
I just got back from a few days on the road. I spent some time with friends and canoed for a bit, then stayed with an old friend (from fourth grade) in Cornell since Sunday. He’s an RA there and is spending the week looking after the seniors before the graduate. Really, he just wants to see his girlfriend, I think.
It gave me time to break my stagnation at home and sketch a few ideas for another essay. I hope to start it soon–ideally tomorrow. I finished some major edits on a short story today and hope to send that out as well. Writing, reading, traveling, writing. It seems like there should be formula somewhere.
As I sketch out my essay and review the notes I made during my trip, I hope to write more about travel, but in the mean time, here’s a sketch since I haven’t posted in a few days.
Novel
I started on my novel again Monday. I began it during my winter break from mid-December to mid-January, then 
took a hiatus during school. I’ve been home for summer for about a week, but spent most of last week finishing final essays and creative writing assignments for classes and proofreading a literature magazine.
It felt great to hit the page again.
I’m going back to the beginning, editing to where I left off and resuming with all the threads in mind. It’s about 50,000 words now, which is about the length of The Great Gatsby. I aim to make it about 100,000, the typical soft-cover length.
So far, working on the novel has been hard but rewarding, especially since I’m neither a professional writer nor do I know what I’m going to do with it. But it begs completion. That’s enough.
Insomnia time
Last night I had a horrific case of insomnia. It hits me now and then, but it’s not regular–at least not normally. When I was in high school, I would sneak out through the garage–the front and back doors squeaked–and walk around my neighborhood. I’m blessed by a secure ring of suburbia, so I was never afraid. I watched the cars sail along the road and the televisions coloring the windows.
I descovered a word for it a few years ago: “noctivagant,” night wandering.
The time of an insomniac differs than a day-dweller. It seems to expand when we have nothing to fill it with, like long Sundays or silent miles passing down a long road. It’s looser, less rigid. Free.
Sometimes I picture time like a flag on windy day, straining to break away from its pole. It rips away and glides high and free, untethered. Such is insomnia time.
Non-economic labels
I just finished Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything, a recent book by writer and researcher F.S. Michaels. She details how an economic view of the world shapes our lives at the expense of other views. The “economic story,” as she calls it, is a way of viewing the world that takes specific biases for reality: mainly that we’re rational individuals with selfish needs behaving in an indifferent market system.
Our world expects us to conform to this monoculture and we hardly notice its pervasive dominance.
It was a fascinating book, and I hope to have a review up this week, but I read it thinking of my own self-proscribed label as a “writer.”
The nearness of the distant
I’ve done a bad job updating this blog so far, so I’m going for a shift of focus: I’m going to make it more personal. I apologize for the gaps in posts so far. Scouts honor–and I was a Boy Scout–I’m going to post more regularly from now on. So to get to business…
I’m nearing my final weeks of junior year. Clouds cover the sky like a rumpled old blanket, sapping color from the St. Bonaventure campus. I imagine Heidegger walking by the nearby river on such days, his steel gray hair matching the clouds, his footsteps lagging as a new thought turns over in his head. He was a heavy guy. Even his name. Heidegger.
I’m writing a paper, drawing from an essay he wrote: “Who is Zarathurstra?” He analyzes the unity he sees between Nietzsche’s concepts of “overman” and “eternal recurrence,” doctrines threaded through Nietzsche’s works. The ideas are heavy, sunken cathedrals built on traditions of metaphysics dating back to Plato.
Through the dry but brilliant essay, a line stands out: “Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
Sometimes philosophy has poetry wedged between the arguments; the line captures my mood during these final weeks.
Backyard Philosophy 