YuHeng's blog

Anyone should have or if not already, listen to Springsteen’s No Nukes Concert. It is… superb.

Cramming for an exam. It’s not that hard really. But I try to attain a logical perfection, where my psychological states coincide and form a perfect synthesis of my understanding and misunderstanding of the reading, which makes it increasingly hard to read because to understand it or conceive of my own misunderstanding, I must exit my mind and in short, abstract it as an outside mind about which I’m observing, and which contains all the facts of understanding and not understanding. But that is insane because its mere scholasticism in which I try to fit anything that is vague and unreal into what is the logical structure of a perfectionist and with no usefulness for the real task that I’m undertaking–reading. I just want to read. But in midst of all this, there is some usefulness. I discover my habit of reading and my habit of abstracting, which prevents me from living in the now–the history and future of all instances. If i can’t sum up the summation of my instantaneous moments, what more can I expect from reading and understanding the world when I cannot take the fulfillment of understanding as a fundamental, primitive experience and indulge in it like hunger or thirst, but I must only think of hunger and never know what I’m eating.

Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is that one must read for the pleasure of reading and not wish to extract any good from it, because the more I do so, the more ‘bad’ I construct (or non-good, be it pleasure, sense of purpose, whatever one dictates their good to be), from which i must break or transcend to extract the good. And that is necessarily the case, but… I think there’re other ways, because in this sense, this state of logical structure of the mind, I am not a perfectionist.

So on the one hand, i am a neurotic perfectionist, but on the other, I am hardly a psycho.