Something been obscurely bothering me: the slowly growing conviction that without really noticing it, I have allowed my brain to turn to mush.
I have been reading
Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, and feeling obscurely guilty. I'm not sure whether I can quite pin down my unease, but it goes something along the lines of
these women are fully engaged with thought, working to define their philosophical outlook, testing and arguing about ideas, considering the effect of political movements, history, literature, writing books. I feel like a mental midget in comparison, and I don't like the sensation. I feel as though I'm only using my brain to keep my skull bones apart.
Because of the computer fiasco, I haven't been writing. Now Rob has extracted data from the crippled hard drive and invited me to load it onto my laptop and begin working. But I don't wanna. My brain feels as though it has gone to sleep. It is difficult to write, to think, to analyze. I look out at the world with half-lidded eyes, wanting only to slither through my day with the least amount of effort. I feel only half awake. I want to veg out in the bath tub, to sleep, to stare blankly into space, thinking of nothing. To read only non-challenging garbage.
So what is it? Depression? Bad diet? A character flaw like laziness? Seasonal affective disorder? Has the day job suddenly devoured my brain after so many years? Or did I just never have any brains at all to begin with, and I'm just noticing?