Having almost no work, I have taken to strolling into the town centre to partake of an Aperol Spritz in the afternoon. Provided one brings a good book, and one is not molested by African or gypsy beggars, or pigeons, it is a highly civilised pastime. I was reading Sun Tzu today and there was (inevitably) mention of Clausewitz in the introduction; I remember reading Clausewitz a few years ago on my now-defunct Kindle, being very impressed, but I now recall almost nothing. There is a strangely spectral quality to the books I have read on a Kindle, the memories more like distant dreams than lived remembrance & experience.

I ordered a new Kindle, having accidentally broken my last. When it arrives, I want to continue with some of the books I was only part-way through (Know no Fear, Mein Kampf, Target Patton, among others). I wonder if instead of just highlighting passages, I should laboriously copy the best out by hand, or by typewriter. I have, after all, two broken Kindles loaded with inaccessible highlights, but ink on paper is fairly enduring. If so, my reading practice would be returning to something of the more distant past, when commonplace books were, well, common.

If so, at the end of my largely misbegotten & ghastly life, I shall have a literary memory of vast, spectral libraries, shelves of books with faded titles, books you open and as in a dream there is only a smudged, faded letterage; and then there will be a few handwritten books of mine, where in rollerball or fountain pen or biro or pencil, I have preserved an incoherent, disjointed substance, lines from poems without attribution, paragraphs from Technological Slavery right next to passages from Evelyn Waugh and Plato – and these shall be bright & solid.