In a year of Thursdays, today remains the greatest Thursday of all. Today is not only World Philosophy Day but also the day on which the Beaujolais nouveau is released. I continue the endless and thankless editing of my dissertation, effectively avoiding finishing the two or three sections of chapter five–I refuse to count how many–that still need words and work. I spent five days last week in Eugene, Oregon, attending the Radical Philosophy Association conference, where I had smart conversations about Benjamin and Blanchot with people who had better educations than I had. I held my own and even offered insight into these two thinkers to people who had written them off as too difficult and opaque. When I was a child, I was taught that the universe was made of atoms and molecules and elements, but now every scientist affirms that what we see is merely a scrim over the dark and invisible universe that does not exist. I think language is like that. Hence, it’s difficult to write words that don’t or can’t say what I mean about something not there in the first place. Having written that, I have already written 183 pages, without finishing the text or even beginning to put my bibliography together. My two-page table of contents mesmerizes me daily: I could stare at its simplicity and form for hours, having never before written anything requiring such a detailed table of contents. For the past week, I’ve been repeatedly listening to Hildegard von Bingen’s The Origin of Fire and Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3