Two things

First, it came to my attention that in a certain thesaurus of philosophic terms the definition of the meaning of life is "grilled cheese sandwich". It is somewhat heartening that we have arrived at the point where the question - at least in academia - is admittedly unanswerable and hence can be joked about. On the other hand it seems dangerous to simply discard it as a joke and proceed with one's intellectual endeavors elsewhere. All the good stuff is always open to interpretation without ever giving definitions and step by step guidelines. Plato's scribblings would have never survived for well over 2k years if he actually told us what the good or justice is. Heidegger complained we aren't perplexed enough and Camus elaborating on Kirkegaard would invent an absurd man - a notion in itself irreconcilable, inconclusive and without definitive answers. In the best traditions of Mr. Bloom the "grilled cheese sandwich" is a symptom of "nihilism without the abyss": there's no meaning but I'm good; are you good? good.

Second, for today's French test, among other things, I had to memorize genders of quite a few inanimate objects. I drew two pictures: the "Le picture" and the "La picture". It helps: here's le bureau sur le tapis with a bunch of les cahiers et les crayons lying around. We are wired to better remember stories and space-time relationships rather than abstract notions. And surely making up pictures and/or tales is a great shorthand for fast learning. But in the end the method seems to be a crutch for an ancient sitting-around-fire-song-singing brain. There is no place for abstract notions in such frame of thinking. It's about time we learned to be led to conclusions "through forms by forms" rather than simplifying and inevitably distorting abstractions by tying them to concrete objects. thus the question is this: Do I deal with my imperfect brain via crutches or do I struggle for the sake of pure dialectics and lose time? I cannot but think in evolutionary terms that even if abstract thinking proved to be a somehow more advantageous approach to natural selection (doubtful) it is just not worth pursuing from the perspective of a single individual's lifespan.

In a way those two things seems to be connected. Do I deal with the given and maybe relax a little bit or do I struggle towards something new but so uncertain? It sometimes appears an individual is enough to push the whole of history into a new spiral. Such individuals - I'm thinking Cézanne - exhibit inhuman determination toward their thing that, by itself, by not being given up, validates the effort. The reward often comes posthumously and thus, in a way, means nothing. This is the problem that cannot be easily (if ever) reconciled with and for which the "grilled cheese sandwich" is an answer both appropriate and very much not.