Pope Francis died yesterday. I read about it on my phone, after I’d woken but before I’d gotten out of bed.

Meaning, I guess, they are not the whole story. And that there is more to life than what they suggest.

The sort of truths I could see being favorites of the devil. Insofar as they are truths, but only a narrow selection of them.

Things deteriorate, entropy is a fact, mortality awaits, etc.

I begin to feel melancholy or depressed if I think about it too much.

The pages of my copy are quite brittle, and little pieces of them flake off here and there if I’m not careful with them as I turn them.

Also in the satchel I brought the copy of Naked Lunch that I’ve been reading. I read some more of it last night while A. and I were sitting on the couch in the apartment, in front of the TV, watching baseball.

On one of the chairs beside me, at the table, I’ve placed the satchel that A. got me as a gift for Christmas and that I use now to carry my laptop, whenever I leave the apartment with it.

I’m at a table this morning, with my laptop, in the atrium of the building near A.’s and my apartment, drinking coffee and trying to decide what to write about.

Or perhaps I’ll write it later, I don’t know, I can’t say I’m going to write such a thing and then immediately write it, as if on command. Any work of art, even a diaristic one (like these entries would like to be) has to be, to some extent, digressive.

I’ll write the opening paragraph of a novel now, for instance, in order that my thoughts do not become so immobile and staid that you couldn’t be blamed for thinking I’ve been working here on an academic essay or textbook.

And because also, I suppose, I’m trying here to follow the course of my imagination — of certain unpredictable impulses that I don’t want to entirely control.

I know that none of these thoughts are new, by the way; writers and thinkers of the past I’m sure have stated them better or more clearly than I have. But I say them now, anyway, because it occurs to me do so.

In other words, our understanding of morality is mostly false, because we have separated it from its metaphysical reality, and immersed it in the inanity of pop culture. But that we still understand it at all is indicative, I think, of how ingrained it is in us, how indestructible it is, as a human characteristic.

I’m thinking, for example, of the phrase ‘what goes around comes around’, as well as the term ‘karma’, which, lifted from its origins in Eastern religion and philosophy, has been denuded of most of its gravitas.

There are consequences for everything, morally speaking, if not always legally. Even in a culture as demoralized as our own we understand this fact, though we tend to rely on clichés to describe it.

Meaning, there was little preventing me from removing the cellophane from the Vivian Maier book and paging through it, right then and there. Which isn’t to say there wouldn’t have been consequences had I done so.

Within the realm, of course, of that which is possible.

Or, anyway, permitted to me. Almost any option is available, at any time, to the person who chooses not to abide by norms, ordinances, or the dictates of conscience.

I love Maier’s work, and certainly would’ve looked through the book had that option been available to me.