I'm feeling a real sensitivity to the aesthetic at the moment, a real harmony with my own thoughts and senses. Sometimes I have these periods, often only moments, when my mind really wakes up and comes into focus. It's as if everything around me takes on a subtly different form for an instant, and then settles more or less back to where it was. I start to understand beauty and emotion and passion, as if a glimpse of their ideal nature is being revealed to me, more so than I get from "every day" experience. It's amazing how you can think you appreciate something and then you see it again, as if for the first time, under a different light, and it develops a new sense of depth and complexity. It's all so transient, so fleeting, yet so deeply powerful and shaping.

I've been reading some fiction lately, something I haven't done in a fair while, and it made me realise (again) how valuable fiction and the "non-knowledge-creating" arts are; this is probably part of the cause of this sensitive state of mind. I feel that sometimes I get so obsessed with learning and knowledge that I start to lose hold of the reason knowledge is valuable: as something to be used and applied in "living". I try and keep these things in balance; experience and contemplation, fact and fiction, thought and silence, listening and talking. All of them are useless without the other.