This weekend I went hiking with Pam, Cynthia, Andro, Kristen, and Ste(ph/v)en. Also on Sunday I ate lunch with Andro and drank coffee at the Albany Pub and played Scrabble.

I have left out two kinds of details from that account, and both on account of a certain intellectual laziness. The first are details of action: both the place and time of the things I did mention, and the things I did but did not describe (for various reasons). The second are details of thought: what the actions meant at the time and what they seem to mean now.

The truth is that I am bored with myself. A lyric by Seven Mary Three: “Seems people get tired of themselves: is that why the TV’s on all the time?” I don’t have a TV and I’m not sure it would help. I am tired of the thoughts things engender in me. I am tired of my packed brain, which runs in interlocking circles. I read almost constantly, looking for new thoughts, trying to fill in the gaps for what I do not yet know.

The philosophers say that for God the universe is a system: that for the Increate every object, every idea, and the forces that tie them together emanate from a single principle: that there is nothing unexpected to God. The psychologists say that a man for whom the universe is a system is probably insane. If nothing is unexpected, if every phenomena can be tied down and explained, then that man’s universe has closed in on itself and has ceased to be infinite: has become a creation of the man’s mind, a cheap poor rip-off: and only a madman would consent to live in a dream-world.

Why, then, do I seek to explain? To what end must I read every old book, looking for answers? When I have read everything, when I have even dissected the cheap repetitious novels of this century for the faintest hints of discord, will the gaps be destroyed?

There are also those who claim that everyone is mad, and that only with the invention of the movie screen and the television have we been able to diagnose psychosis in everyone, and at last realize that in fact all we have ever wanted is to close out the gaps, to live in a world of perfectly self-referential symbols, to be unaware of the distinction between programming and advertising, to close our eyes and sleep.