'… keeps me writing…': a writer's existence, worried and worrying, worried and worrier, condensed into a drop of grammar.

'Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over the question of whether or not a rule has been followed. People don't come to blows over it, for example.'

Mulhall reads each of his authors—Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard—in Inheritance and Originality in multiple works, permitting in each case some recognition of a moment of continuation or renewal, subtending a view of thinking 'as at once both new and renewed', or of 'the necessary situatedness of any philosophical originality'. But this recognition's dependence, in each case, on the existence of multiple, separate works (sometimes not even finished ones, as in Wittgenstein's case)—on books—suggests that 'thought's renewal' is itself a philosophical narrative or myth laid over a more material, practical fact: that it is in, around, with, through, reading in its relation to everyday life that philosophy is fundamentally being situated. 'Go on', 'next', 'new', 'renew', 'continue', are categories to be understood relative to books and their individuation.

'Wie weiß er aber…' (§1): the two points the interlocutor focuses on in Wittgenstein's example, about which Wittgenstein says that he just assumes the shopkeeper acts as described, also seem to lend themselves to construal in terms of an idea of rules (cf. the use of a table as a rule in §86, and the effort to establish rules for actions or names' meanings in §§82–3).

—As if readers became skeptics through reading too much.

If Descartes' Meditations were a longer book, it wouldn't be believable.

One of those nights where you remember every lover. Not by trying, nor not trying, just one, then another, and another.

Celan the aphorist

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