I’m falling back two hours and setting my biological clock to Stephen Savings Time so I can do writing as a near full-time job. This means my evenings will start winding down at 7:30pm so I can be up and ready to clock in at 4:30am.

Until I get this done, I will be saying “no” to a lot of invitations. Please do not take this, or the rest of my monomania, personally.

*

Writing this book is inspiring me return to many older ideas, to recall them, recollect them, and to reintegrate them into a clearly conceived unity. The process is forcing me to prioritize what I include, and, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, make exclusions. This pruning and shaping is cleansing. I’ve accumulated a lot of ideas and associations, some fully comprehended and internalized, some only synthetically known about, but not intrinsic to how I think. Writing is forcing me to make distinctions between what is essential, and what is dispensable, and I am feeling it not only in my mind, but in my heart and my body.

*

Much of what I am recollecting is from the early days of my life-changing encounter with Nietzsche, so he is freshly on my mind. His words are especially resonant now, especially these:

Is there a more holy condition than that of pregnancy? To do all we do in the unspoken belief that it has somehow to benefit that which is coming to be within us! — Has to enhance its mysterious worth, the thought of which fills us with delight! In this condition we avoid many things without having to force ourselves very hard! We suppress our anger, we offer the hand of conciliation: our child shall grow out of what is gentlest and best. We are horrified if we are sharp or abrupt: suppose it should pour a drop of evil into the dear unknown’s cup of life! Everything is veiled, ominous, we know nothing of what is taking place, we wait and try to be ready. At the same time, a pure and purifying feeling of profound irresponsibility reigns in us almost like that of the auditor before the curtain has gone up — it is growing, it is coming to light: we have no right to determine either its value or the hour of its coming. All the influence we can exert lies in keeping it safe. ‘What is growing here is something greater than we are’ is our most secret hope: we prepare everything for it so that it may come happily into the world: not only everything that may prove useful to it but also the joyfulness and laurel-wreaths of our soul. — It is in this state of consecration that one should live! It is a state one can live in! And if what is expected is an idea, a deed — towards every bringing forth we have essentially no other relationship than that of pregnancy and ought to blow to the winds a presumptuous talk of ‘willing’ and ‘creating’. This is ideal selfishness: continually to watch over and care for and and to keep our soul still, so that our fruitfulness shall come to a happy fulfillment! Thus, as intermediaries, we watch over and care for to the benefit of all; and the mood in which we live, this mood of pride and gentleness, is a balm which spreads far around us and on to restless souls too. — But the pregnant are strange! So, let us be strange too, and let us not hold it against others if they too have to be so! And even if the outcome is dangerous and evil: let us not be less reverential towards that which is coming to be than worldly justice is, which does not permit a judge or executioner to lay hands on one who is pregnant!