Brain mush

[pegkerr]

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?

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Were Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt (who shows up a lot in the book I'm now editing) working full-time and raising kids when they had this correspondence? Did they have no paid household help? Did they have spouse/partner relationships to maintain with someone who worked a screwy schedule and had OCD?

C'mon. Very few people, male or female, are able to "do it all"--and I suspect that even they secretly have something they want to do and aren't getting done, or have something they have given up along the way.

Besides, you do have correspondence exploring ideas. It's called LJ. Maybe the ideas aren't always fully thought through and beautifully polished, but I'd bet that McCarthy's and Arendt's letters didn't originally look exactly the way they appear in the book, either--or only the few that did were picked for the book. (As a copy editor, I get to see how some Big Names in the field of philosophy really write. Hoo, boy. I can't query, "WTF?????" although I often want to, but there's a fair amount of querying along the lines of "This sentence has two contradictory verbs and no subject. Can you reword?")

All that said, I often feel the desire to do more testing and arguing regarding my ideas. J is good for this, and LJ is in a limited way, but a wider circle would be interesting. Social events at your and my mutual social circle seem to tend to small talk. It can be frustrating.

I sometimes feel intellectually guilty when I look at the pile of nonfiction books beside the bed, waiting to be read, and after a day of editing some obscure scholarly work all I want to read is a mystery. But then I remember that I did spend all those hours reading Serious stuff, and I happily veg out with the mystery.