A Commonplace Book

They suspected him of arousing their suspicions.

They're only trying to make me LOOK paranoid!

It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.

Recursive, adj.; see Recursive

I had no difficulty at all in gaining a modest grant to do some research towards a book on aspects of grant application ... and into the ambit of the Institute of Job Reductivism, at the time being run by John (later Sir John) Green, who went on to become Director of the Institute of Directors.

...Most of the fellows were engaged in straightforward reductivist studies. There were papers being written on -- among other things -- recruiting personnel to the personnel recruitment industry, writing in-house magazines for corporate communications companies, auditing procedures to be adopted for accounts, and assessing life cover rates for actuaries. The resident Marxist was engaged on a complex analysis of the division of domestic cleaning labour among people who worked in the domestic cleaning industry.

Once again, I was overidentifying with a fictional character, this time a character whose tragic flaw was overidentifying with tragic fictional characters.

[I] took some comfort from the thought that at least I still had my wits about me. Or at least I felt as if I did. Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me — and here was an arresting notion — unless persuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by the fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That's the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it's gone, it's too late to get it back.