I finished the concerto for two flutes and the orchestra. The ending was tiring, quite dense in texture and quite fast. However, my fatigue should not seep into the music itself; on the contrary, this ending, just like the entire piece, should be on the lighter side. In any case, lighter than most of what I produce. We’ll see. The piece is called Minute Concerto (no other language versions of the title exist) and lasts about 17 minutes. It might be premiered in March, perhaps, in Vilnius, perhaps.

As I was writing, a vision of another concert began to take shape, involuntarily, this time with a piano in mind. Some different space it was; a huge, spherical plane of sorts. But that must wait its turn until after Şeküre is done. Now I’m back working on the finale of act one. I've been thinking about this too; I was pondering the options in my head, mainly two: short and long. Not too short and not too long – that would be best.

I bought the first Polish edition of selected essays by the ‘new star of the humanities’, Byung-Chul Han (The Burnout Society), and I’m wading through. I’m trying. I tried it first in English, but I gave up, thinking that the problem lay in the language. However, the problem probably lies in the content of the book itself. The text resists me and irritates me with its opacity at times. All the more so because this opacity is a bit of a paradox; everything points to full transparency: precise and short sentences, a very concise form, simple theses, actually, presented in the chapter titles. And yet, every now and again I have no idea what the author is writing about. Perhaps this is deliberate, in line with one of the chief theses (that’s assuming that I understood anything at all) that modernity lacks (among other things) the ability to stop and contemplate, but if so, in my case, the goal misses the mark almost completely. I’m not contemplating, I’m getting pissed. I’m trudging on, anyway, because I feel that there is something to it and that these diagnoses are at least partly accurate and somehow valid. And I also feel that they are partly a miss, what makes them even more important. My main doubts: firstly, such global, static diagnoses overlook the chaotic local variability of reality as a whole (a trivial but clear example being the beginning of one of the essays, written in 2015: “Every age has its signature afflictions. [...] Despite widespread fear of an influenza epidemic, we are not living in a viral age. Thanks to immunological technology, we have already left it behind.”) And secondly, proposing negative theses about modernity suggests implicitly that there are some examples of past times/societies that are a positive, lost antithesis. Something tells me this is rubbish. For all my gloomy pessimism and scepticism that I had inherited from my ancestors, I am deeply convinced that things are, in general, getting better. And this is in no way contradictory to the fact that at no time or place can any individual attempting to grasp all things with reason honestly conclude that things are good as they are. It is what it is.

(transl. Magdalena Małek-Andrzejowska)