As usual this morning I managed to get myself out of bed about 07.30 and return to its warmth with a cup of tea to start the day with some reading. There were just a couple of Kindle pages left of Sloterdijk’s The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as Practice, and he finishes with a quotation from an old friend Fernando Pessoa which I must repeat here:
‘The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The somber majesty of unknown splendour . . . and all at once I experience the sublime state of the monk in the wilderness or of the hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the stones and in the caves of withdrawal from the world. And at this table in my room I’m less of a petty, anonymous employee. I write words as if they were the soul’s salvation and I gild myself with the impossible sunset of high and vast hills in the distance, and with the status I received in exchange for life’s pleasures and with the ring of renunciation on my evangelical finger, stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.’
Great stuff! And then having finished Sloterdijk I turn to another book I am currently reading: Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and read:
‘That’s not all, though. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa writes: “The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognises as useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.”
A little later Alameddine writes:
‘Whether we find Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase, civilisation will march forward and backward, people will trot the globe, wars will rage, lunches will be served. Whether anyone reads Pessoa. None of this art business is of any consequence. It is mere folly.’
So? Yes it must be true that my writing which is only published on this blog and maybe is glanced at by one or two people is of no consequence; yet . . . yet it feels like vital work and, yes, which simultaneously is a stupid waste of time.
On we go!
How real I am; such an intensity of existing. It surprises me that Descartes based his existence on thinking rather than simply the avalanche, the torrent of pre-thought feeling. Somehow or other he used doubt to undermine his exuberance for life and decided that his thought must take precedence. If Socrates had his absences, when he would stand “lost” in thought, apparently absent from the world about him, then would he retain awareness of his body. Was his “lost in thoughtness” more real to him than his physical existence? To what degree do I know what his absences might have felt like? You see I bring feeling into it. Feeling I see as being more embodied than thought. Does thinking necessarily fight its way up towards abstraction. And because of our love of hierarchy which determines that up is better than down, heaven is up there somewhere and hell always down beneath us. The body that will be buried in the earth, to rot, to break down in a riot of bacterial joy. Perhaps the soul or spirit freed from its burden flies free up into the heavens. The upward march towards ever greater rationality and abstraction reached excitable heights in the so-called enlightenment of the eighteenth century and from our perch in the early twenty first century we can see the rocks that the great ship hit in the twentieth. I rest awhile on my ledge and survey the damage and crushed hopes with the rest of my fellow survivors with a sage nod to the orgy of consumerism and economic growth which knows no end. 
I like the line: ‘An unusually hot summer stripped the memories from our bodies’ that you quote from Michael Kruger. I like ‘unusually’ and ‘stripped’ and ‘our’; it’s those words from which we can glimpse their story. There was something different about that summer, something uncanny that took us into a new situation. Memories are stripped from our bodies, like clothing, the memory clothing that identifies how we see each other and who we think we are, held together by shared and reshared narratives.