If our minds were occupied, surely so many things would not enter them

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

A trip to a bookstore, on the thought that they might, by some chance, have available the second volume of The Man without Qualities (the need for which has suddenly become pressing), even though I believe I have it in socal, has instead finally brought me, at long last, a copy of Kenkō's Essays in Idleness, in the Keene translation. I had it out at Chicago for a year and a half or so, and I think the whole year my first year here. It hadn't really occurred to me that I might buy it until I saw the shelf of Asian texts at the store.