Redemption: "I want to climb a high mountain today"

It's a happy, reflective melancholy.

I've had a lot of time to think thoughts this summer. Some thoughts I meant to think were thought; others not meant to think, too; some got lost, some couldn't keep up, some became nauseous, some just called for the sherpas and kept climbing. Some we didn't get to -- surprise; summertime is bountiful and sparkling but finite. I don't lack imagination, I wonder if one will ever run out of thoughts to think, or if they keep getting generated, saplings planted in the cracks of fertile minds, faster than one can think them.

Sometimes I just want to take a rest. "Why are my hobbies so demanding?" I ask myself, but I don't bother answering. I could look over and read the titles on the stack of books by my bed, but they've been packed. Asceticism is demanding, asceticism is commanding, but I wouldn't change it. And if a giddy madness falls sharply, at least it passes just as quickly: it is too superfluous to survive an ascetic. I'm not talking about monks' half-starvation diets, I still eat cookies.

I suppose I've been thinking a little about Vancouver recently, the places, the peoples. Last time I left Vancouver, in March, it was only for a few days -- a few hectic and harrowing days -- but, how happy I was to see from the plane the glittering lights in familiar shapes on the ground. Sitting in my fortress, which others might mistake for my bedroom, sometimes it might seem a little distant, but it's about to get more distant, and more thoughts will get more demanding. "Vital energy," my maternal grandfather once told me, "is the sine qua non of a successful career." -- well then! If I understood what he meant, how can things go badly? (Variation on the Socratic paradox: ultimate Platonic prejudice.) And if the name Princeton has cachet born of past success, then it creates its own future success when the next generation wants to earn and be worthy of that cachet, too: so how can one fail with so many good people around? Perhaps I am like Goethe, too conciliatory for real tragedy -- during the day, at least, when the sun shines; but when I'm on the East Coast, the sun keeps shining for three hours more after it sets.

So! "Was Das - das Lieben?" will ich zum Tode sprechen. "Wohlan! Noch Ein Mal!" ("Was that life?" I want to say to death. "Well then! Once more!") Take stock and then -- En avante! Up the Republic! That's my war cry.

So I sit here telling myself my past. And I bake cookies. Let me tell you how: some secrets shouldn't vanish altogether with the comings and goings of aircraft. I thought I might conjure a fanciful name for these, something like "Aztec Ambrosia," or maybe "It Didn't Make Me Stronger," but that's maybe a bit much, fusing mythologies willy-nilly, so let's stick with:

Double Chocolate Chip Cookies

• 1 1/4 c. margarine
  
• 2 c. sugar, or a little less
  
• 2 eggs ("large")
  
• 3 tsp. vanilla (15 ml)
  
• 2 c. flour
  
• 1 tsp. baking soda (5 ml)
  
• 3/4 c. cocoa
  
• semi-sweet chocolate chips (200-250 grams)

Add ingredients in this order in a bowl. Mix at each stage. I do it manually with a fork (which demands some rigour with the wrist), in which case it is helpful to add the dry ingredients piecemeal and mix in between, but you can find your prefered method. Drop by teaspoons onto ungreased cookie sheets. (One teaspoon in each hand is very convenient.) Bake at 350 degrees (Fahrenheit, of course) for about 12 minutes. Good the first day, excellent the second and beyond. Makes 32 cookies. Store in glazed ceramic Austrian snowman.

I'm kidding about the 32 cookies thing. I just can't remember the last time it didn't come out to 32 cookies. (About the snowman thing, too.) Probably I'm unconsciously acting to keep it that way, by now. Put on a CD you wanted to listen to while baking; from start to last-tray-out is about an hour. My father's first piece of cooking advice to his children was: Pay attention! But this is pretty fool-proof, unless you put the cookies in the oven and then go to write something for a while and lose track of time.

I think I have to go now.



Postscript, that night.

Here you can see the Austrian snowmen: the jolly, fat one on the right holds cookies and the equally jolly, slightly less fat one on the left just dangles his legs and enjoys his hot cocoa. Before you make fun of them, as so many cads have been wont to do, you should know that my mother brought these back from a Christmas village in Austria.

You might justly wonder how it is that suddenly I have so little to do that I'm posting pictures of my cookie jar on the Internet. If someone said this to me, I might quibble that it is only one picture. What can I say? The walls are getting bare here. The last books are packed; I kept only three to take with me for the crossing: an anthology of science fiction, Kaufmann's Portable Nietzsche, and Šafarevic's Basic Algebraic Geometry. The problem is that I can't do math late at night. I'll never be able to get to sleep with ghosts of quasiprojective varieties floating and flickering in twisted knots through my brain. (No, knot theory doesn't come in here, that was just descriptive prose.) Fortunately, I seem to have the next week just about booked up.