My greatest regret is that I have never become familiar with hard work. It leaves an immense gap in one's learning: what are the limitations of self? When is it appropriate to rest? How sustainable is a workload? To foster that intimacy is critical to the education of any human being.

In the end though, all education is self-education: you are the key to your meaning. And perhaps recollection is the teeth on the key...Years ago, at a time when life was haze–although there were fewer fires and the sky was clearer–I was trying to read Camus' L'Etranger (although it was translated into English and called The Stranger). I was miserable and despite a genuine upwelling to read this work, a spark of something like interest, despite the motive coming easily, I struggled immensely with the text itself. Each time I read a sentence I would forget what it said, I could keep neither words nor meaning in mind. In vain I'd read paragraphs aloud in my head, making myself think each word, one after the other–a labored reading, one may deduce–but even as each word, specimen like 'the' and 'is and 'a' were dredged up with immense effort, they fell back into the murk the moment I let up. I did read The Stranger in full this way, however, and my report was and is in recollection: a haze. I remember a shooting, a beach, boardwalk and little else.

Now perhaps Camus has a way with words in translation, a hypnotic sort of effect–but no! The strange phenomena was not limited to The Stranger, it pervaded every attempt I made to read. Lovecraft, around that time, on somebody's recommendation. Little better. Years later I was emerging from that haze and devoured about a dozen books in a sort of remedial effort. It was startling to me, how much I struggled to think at the time. I could not hold themes and concepts in my head. I had had no issues with a certain Lazy Dungeon Master nor internet posts...there is a startlingly great divide between the novel and internet popcorn. I labored over each and every thought that came to me as I read, struggled to carry them throug, even remember them as I did. At the time thinking became a brutal process. Each step was difficult, like learning to walk all over again, that's how it felt. And perhaps because most of it was done consciously, I could feel strands of the mind connecting and forming thoughts, that conscious but unguided nature of the mind. Nowadays I don't struggle like that and the mind feels more like a symphony, I guide many parts from afar. It's returned to a shadow of the state of long ago...now there is a long way to go. There was meaning, a new intimacy of the mind uncovered therein, however:

"the darker the night, the brighter stars,

The deeper the grief, the closer is god!"

As Fyodor Dostoyevsky said. So when the mind is not willing, even literacy will not help one read. But if one could turn the key and press on the door...

I fear I've overrated circles as a tool for drawing heads, but surely improving on the old should not make one embarassed of the old.