Leap Day in a Leap Location

Diary notes produce material quite different from blog posts. I’m reminded of qualities present in Pascal’s Pensées—not intended for an audience, the background “understood.” When writing for an audience one’s perpetually on one’s toes not to offend by dismissive characterization of some way of seeing things—because the years of meditation that brought me to my own view cannot be included without wandering off into vast and for the moment irrelevant jungles.

The Michigan primaries took place yesterday, hence we watched the reportage. After some ten days of abstinence, the face of modernity struck me as weirdly mask-like, a horrid African carving. The real lesson is that one shouldn’t interact at all. The facts are easily obtained by simply scanning headlines now and then. The feeling is that I’m removing myself from common life and that in consequence I am neglecting some vital obligation, but in truth the televised mirage is not the common life at all but a kind of grotesque deformation. We were delighted to learn that the Grosse Point library millage proposition won an overwhelming 72 percent approval. In a way we are very far removed from what Robert Graves once called “All That.” But the information channels are still open. We know of the library because by means of Kindle and such, John could study the Detroit Free Press in deep detail… (Florida notes.)