This is a year's worth of weekday meditations on the Christian lectionary readings of the day. They were composed on a journey through the Balkans, written each morning after listening to Mass broadcast from an academic chapel in the U.K.
My rooms here in the Pirin mountains of Bulgaria are not far from the base of the mountains, and I have explored the paths a few times. These meditations are a bit like the occasional wanderings up the mountain. On some mornings, I have walked up uncleared portions of the hill; sometimes I have walked up paved paths; sometimes I have walked up blazed trails. Some of these writings reach worthwhile things relatively clearly, some vanish into a bit of a muddle after a short struggle, and some give some indication that a later journey to the mountaintop might be possible.
Looking back through them, I can see where, for months at a time, difficult living situations made for unclear thoughts, or the thoughts seem to crystallize around certain holidays or journeys. They were written in various Balkan cities: Sarajevo, Belgrade, Cluj-Napoca, Skopje, Durres, Budapest.
I commend them to unknown readers with the suggestion that they not be read straight through, but perhaps by randomly picking a day, and starting from there. This book is a sequence of short journeys, and the only claim the entirety of the text makes is that every day, I set out with some hope. The entirety, as Adorno says, is the false. But the several, scattered things within might be true.
