From Puebla I brought back my notebooks from the year 2014, when I first started journaling. I will eventually backfill everything I've written since then, but the year 2014 will suffice until I go back to Mexico. I'll surely have to redact some things. Inside the cover pockets of the very first journal, I found a scrap of paper in Spanish, which counts as my very first entry. I was very amused at what I wrote (translated from Spanish):
October 11, 2013
I'm writing this from the subway car. I just let MarΓa go [on her flight back to Spain]. I love her like no one else in the world, but it's time for us both to grow apart. I thought it would be a liberating moment, but it weighs on me terribly.
Today is a special day; I consider it the beginning of a new way of life. It will be a life in which work and pleasure are one and the same, in which what I am and what I want to be are one and the same, where I have the space and time to do philosophy. There are still things that tie me to my past life, but I'll be able to free myself from them in a few weeks. I still don't know if I'm crazy; time and success will tell.
I'm going in search of virtue. I want to be a better person, to prove that it's possible to change, to do what you love and earn a living outside of traditional frameworks.
I have many hypotheses to experiment with, but the first thing will be to make the interactive book. If I win the prize, the opportunities to experiment will multiply. You must not fall into distractions; you've sacrificed a lot to reach these conditions. Failing is not an option.
The rest of your life lies ahead, and it depends on this.
This project echoes with h0p3's βπͺπ‘ππ£π±π’π΅π± in a strange parallel, though I feel he has understood his task much better than I have. I'm not sure I understand mine yet. The sensations are still the same. I still feel lacking in virtue and I live in a very traditional framework, yet I'm in a different place spiritually. I'm cool with that. Yesterday I finally came around to downloading h0p3's Hypertext Companion for Claude and had a productive conversation with it. I think it will help me derive axioms from my own body of work. I don't have a systematic mind, not in my work and not in my life, I rely on intuition and I'm well attuned and discerning about it. This is how I produce my work and live my life, but this doesn't mean the axiomatic way of life is wrong, if my life has taught me anything it's that dualities intertwine and elevate each other: axioms inform intuitions and viceversa.