It's about two weeks before I'll be able to quietly sit down with Adams bok and continue, on the plane of everyday encounter, my translation work. At the moment I have the most ready distractions, universities offering me money, airplanes flying me across the Atlantic, across the Baltic, across the most fathomable parts East of the Mississippi. I recognize the work as a sort of gift, something to continue doing, something to marry with so long as the project lasts. In Åsa Moberg's Simone och jag there's a quotation from Beauvoir about the initiation of her lifelong partnership with Sartre:

We were never going to become strangers to each other, never would one of us cry out in vain for the other; nothing would be more important than this union, but neither would it ever be allowed to degenerate into force or habit: at whatever price we needed to protect it against such an abasement. (p. 61)

Maybe I'm drawn to this pact, and the posing of its negative aspect, in light of an uncertain realization that neither of the institutions I've been accepted to for PhD work would provide sufficiently for a sense of myself and my own engagement. This marriage, if it is not to another person, is to the process of writing. Which I consider in its most meaningful form inseparable from a kind of ethics, of making actual something intimated in such a way that allows it to live in the world. Is it Kant?: The actual is the right, and the right is the actual. In terms of my own engagement this can't be quite right. Rather what is actual is a process, which like a marriage, isn't just given as right, but the work is to make it so. In this case to make the words of Swedish right themselves into English. While my tendency is always to foreground the psychological motivations for certain endeavors and dynamics, I am suddenly made to contend with the oddly subtle truth that the work in itself is something I am drawn to, seek to be part of, and is its own justification.