Status Updates From Discourse on Method and Med...

"Je savais que l'éloquence a des forces et des beautés incompatables,la poésie a des délicatesses et des doucers trés ravissantes, que les mathématiques ont des inventions trés subtiles et qui peuvent beaucoup servir,tant à contenter les curieux,qu'a faciliter tous les arts et diminuer le travail des hommes; que la théologie enseigne à gagner le ciel ..."

"Riconoscevo che la lettura dei buoni libri è come una conversazione con gli uomini più illustri dei secoli passati che ne furono gli autori "

In fairness, I'm probably not smart enough to read this cold. Philosophy is something I appreciated in a classroom setting or learned through discussion with people who read philosophy, so that in turn I could read with some clue of the skeleton giving shape and structure to the ideas. I'd probably do well to browse notes online and skim back over some of this at a later date.

Back to thinking I don't understand this, or only understand it in fits and bursts. Section five was more physiology than philosophy, a meandering metaphor that kind of made me start to tune out of my reading. Blood going this way and blood flowing that way and blah blah blah. Sometimes this text is fascinating and sometimes, well, not so much.

Miss me, Descartes? I just read the bit with your admirable three personal maxims, though if I'm reading this correctly (which we should all call into question)... it's terribly honest of you to tell us that nine years into these positive ways of thinking, you weren't really sure if it would make much of a difference for anyone else. But hey, go you.

Dear Descartes: it's not you, it's me. Okay, so it's both of us. You're surprisingly practical for your brand of philosophy & I know I've read & understood excerpts before. But you're also really into the run-on sentences, huh? The kind that trail off & forget where they started? Yeah, those. Also, I'm kind of in a junk-food-book mood. Sorry, bro.

What I've learned: 3AM after days of not feeling well is NOT the correct time to try to wrap my head around philosophy. There was an a-ha moment, a brief flash of understanding everything I was reading. This was then followed by all of the text being filtered into my brain in the voice of any adult ever in a Peanuts cartoon. "Mwoar mwoar mwa moarrr," says René Descartes. You bet, Descartes. Yup. I get it now.