N is for Neville.

So, a new year, a litany of new failures, and a new blog - as far as I can tell that's become the basic template of my life. Curious readers (indulging me for the moment the fancy of assuming they exist) might ask why it's taken until May for my year to begin, and the only answer I can give is that the last handful of months haven't been particularly relevant, interesting, or important on any practical level. Job opportunities have fallen by the wayside, work and study have been neglected; and aside from honing the development of my own personal verfremdungseffekt the only positive benefit has been a painful awakening to the nature of honesty and consequence and transparency (am I too old and well-educated to still be naïve about these things?).

I'm hoping that a new home will bring some optimism to a new chapter of life, even if it necessarily carries with it memories (some distant, some recent) of subtle underminings and public humiliations. I'm of course anxious about how to finance the new place after I become unemploy(ed)(able) in six weeks, but that problem can be overcome through a generally austere lifestyle and a diet consisting entirely of congee. Slightly more worrying is the thought that I'd no longer be able to fund my studies, which are sadly right now about the only avenue I can pursue to gain any sort of mobility (escape), even if I spend more time on campus reading Malraux than I do legislation.

(I feel that these paragraphs are too oblique (obtuse)(obfuscatory)(obscure)(opaque), that I should start over.)

My secret shame of being an old man was revealed yesterday in spectacular fashion. The act itself brought about an epiphanous, acute awareness of my age; and how I feel so distant and apart from those many years of lived experience. I can't escape the sense that I was flung whole and complete into this world only months (days? hours?) ago, and that momentarily someone will explain the riddle I'm supposed to solve with all of these memories. According to my (soon to be useful only for cheap bus fares) student ID I still have a handful of years ahead of me before reaching the age at which Christ died, so perhaps I should finally stop procrastinating and put into action some plan to lead a more Christlike existence (is it more productive to start with the carpentry or the lepers)? Forgiveness is the most taxing, grueling process imaginable, from either perspective; but I find the relinquishing of the weight of memory surprisingly far more difficult than the perpetual penance and self-chastisement of having wronged. Those Hermanosde Luz passion-players choose by far the less troublesome path, you can be sure.

This was my first real post to a new 'blog (perhaps it would've been a little more coherent and structured, a little less banal and indulgent, if I'd not been writing it in clandestine fashion and languishing in aloneness at work?). I'm not sure yet whether it will be my last.

“Her intense and pure religiousness took the form of her having equal faith in the existence of another world and in the impossibility of comprehending it in terms of earthly life. All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead..."