A holiday week serves as a temporal passe-partout. My exhausted mind feels blank. The passage of time reframes the intense extended now into a segment of the past. Something to reflect upon rather than be immersed in.
The surf along the Great Ocean Road is quite flat. Refreshed by some leisurely paddling, I read Bruno Latour’s conversations with Michel Serres. The latter is great at fending off criticism for being a difficult and incomprehensible writer:
“… there is no universal method. Which is the reason … for drawing an appropriate method from the very problem one has undertaken to resolve. Thus, the best solutions are local, singular, specific, adapted, original, regional. This is the source of the disparity you were complaining about, which makes for difficult reading. Obviously, the work is not streamlined - not for the reader, and especially not for the author, because each time he tackles a problem he has to start over again at zero. Everyone enjoys the familiar always reading the same books, seeing the same paintings, eating the same cake every Sunday. Don't confuse conviction and indolence! Universal metalanguage is comfortable and lazy.
You have to invent a localized method for a localized problem. Each time you try to open a different lock, you have to forge a specific key, which is obviously unrecognizable and without equivalent in the marketplace of method.“
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