How many people do you have who will stick around forever? No matter what happens, no matter how things shake out, these people will be exhaustively and constantly interested and present in your life. Not occasionally but daily. Bearing your burdens, witnessing your life, being your life. Knowing the texture of your daily existence until that existence reaches its end. How many?

I don’t think it’s a high number. A couple? Three? Maybe four if you are still young. Not a lot.

Marriage is the best way to get a person like that. And even better, to be a person like that for somebody. It’s such a relief, you know? You are done choosing, done making up your mind, done figuring it out. It’s a really great thing.

So if you need to get divorced, go for it. It’s completely up to you. The world is deeply indifferent.

But the next time maybe consider doing it the way I described. I mean, you’ve already tried the other way. It’s time for a different approach.

Think about it, is all I ask.

The Ise Shrine in Japan is a holy site of Shintoism. It’s 1,300 years old, and of course the UNESCO put it on its list of World Heritage Sites. But here’s a problem. The shrine isn’t 1,300 years old in any sense that we can understand. It gets purposefully destroyed and rebuilt every 20 years. That’s why the WEF loves the Ise Shrine. It’s very fluid, and they see it as a metaphor of everything they hold dear. UNESCO was horrified by what any Westerner perceives as a fake landmark and yanked the shrine off its list. Then there was a campaign to castigate UNESCO over this un-PC act but that part of the story is boring.

I’m writing this in the depths of the Old City in Spain’s Pontevedra. The old buildings, the ruins, the uneven centuries-old walls are magical because they are old. I can see the passage of time in them. They are cracked, ravaged, blackened, covered in moss. For me, they are original because they don’t look like they did when they were originally created. The changes made by age testify to the originality of the buildings. For the worshippers at Ise, on the other hand, the real way to preserve the original version of the shrine is to keep it looking as it did originally. And the only way to do that is to rebuild.

When I look at the old walls in Pontevedra, I am awed by the hidden essence I perceive in them. The feeling that the true nature of people and things is hidden in impenetrable depths marks me as belonging to the Western civilization. Once a year, the high priest of the Jews entered the Holy of Holies where the spirit of God would be present. Nobody else could go in, and the name of God was hidden from the faithful. Christians continued the tradition of looking for The Truth in enclosed spaces through their practice of cloistered religious orders. Today, the most atheistic of Westerners work hard to figure out their innermost authentic self that is hidden even from them. The Holy of Holies has migrated into the interiority of human beings but everything else about it remained the same.

In his 2011 book Shanzhai: The Art of Falsification and Deconstruction in China, Byung-Chul Han talks about the differences in how the culture of the Far East and the culture of the West perceive such notions as originality, authorship, and essence. It’s a short volume that I read in an hour but it’s very enlightening. We cannot spend too much time thinking about cultural differences and how profound they are.

Byung-Chul Han says, for example, that the notion of a contradiction isn’t an important one in Chinese thought. That’s why the Chinese copied the Western ideology of Communism and then combined it with the Western ideology of free markets that they also copied. Nothing original comes from China because that’s another concept that has no currency. Han is very optimistic for China, thinking that the sheer ebullience if its exercises in fakery will let it jump into democracy. Which will be yet another idea copied from the West.

Thanks to Shanzhai, I can stop wondering why there’s no original thought coming out of China. I now know: producing original thought is simply not a thing in Chinese culture. This is a great relief. If people are simply not into that, I get it.

A small neighborhood bookstore in Pontevedra shocked my sensibilities, and not in a good way. Books weren’t arranged by author’s name, genre, country, or language. They were strewn around in untidy, careless piles. There was no principle behind the arrangement unless there’s such a thing as principled messiness. It took effort to prevent myself from sorting them nicely.

Only an absolute maniac could find anything in that ungodly disarray. Thankfully, I am a maniac, and here is my haul:

Prepare yourselves, my friends. Five of these are not fiction, so we’ll be able to discover new ideas.

In the meantime, Russia is having another normal one:

How embarrassing is it when people worship politicians?

Very embarrassing.

But hey, at least, Obama wasn’t a career criminal who ODed in Minnesota. Then the worship would have been downright unhinged.

Wendy Brown does criticize neoliberalism. However, her idea of a solution to all neoliberal ills is… open borders. Every leftie who tries to say something against neoliberalism ends up getting scared and almost immediately reverts to a screeching defense of mass migration.

An anti-neoliberal liberal is a contradiction in terms. You either think that freedom from all constraints, including biological, is possible and good or you don’t. If freedom sounds more appealing than duty and permanence, criticizing some minor manifestations of this deification of freedom is mostly a waste of time.

Lefties twist themselves into weird shapes, claiming that cutting off a mentally disabled woman’s breasts is wonderful and freedom-making but cutting off her disability benefits is bad and unacceptable. They want to condemn the neoliberal economy but hysterically celebrate the neoliberal mentality that only came into existence to make that economy possible. I spent years trying to contort myself into a similar shape until I realized that the problem isn’t with some obscure aspect of neoliberalism. The whole thing stinks. It stinks in its entirety.

Does anybody have any interesting topics to suggest? I’m traveling, and so I read little and think less. But I’m eager to opine if only I could settle on the subject of opining.

In his last days in office, Biden started changing the US Constitution by means of social media posts:

I’m putting this hear because people will forget the moment Trump is sworn in that there is now precedent for this, and the Democrats started it.

Last night Russians attacked the beautiful Zaporizhzhia cathedral:

And here is how our hotel in Aveiro interpreted our oft-repeated request for 2 beds:

My sister and I are close but not in a physical way.