Building off my last essay about the current state of my projects, it’s also important to keep in mind when assessing my writing these days that I have a day job. Between my professional and personal work, I think I’m working harder right now than I ever have … the division of my writing tends to ebb and flow between the two sides of my persona.

This Labor Day weekend, for example, I had to put in an unusual amount of work on my day job. I am supporting a new person who is wonderful to write for, but he needs a great deal of support because he was thrown into his position unexpectedly. Without getting into the details, I wrote six speeches for him this weekend because event organizers were so slow in getting us the details about when he was supposed to speak and what about.

It was exhausting, but there’s a very large benefit to times like these — I know in such crunches that my words are needed and appreciated. People are expecting them, they will read them closely, others will hear and immediately respond to them. I have no doubt that the work I do leads to something, and this is valuable.

Contrast this to what I was describing in that last essay. I write day after day on my blogs, some of the work is even more difficult than what I do for pay, and there’s not even a question of earning money for it all, that thought doesn't enter my mind. The harder part is getting no feedback on the work, no proof that anyone is actually reading or reacting to what I say in any way.

I hope this will make anyone who might be out there silently reading understand why I search continuously for evidence that my words are not floating in the world in isolation, picked up only by SEO systems, AI crawlers and the occasional Russian looking to create backlinks and spam my comments section. Like the SETI program, pointed to the skies hoping to pick up radio signals from the vast universe that there is someone out there, I hope to discover that my words reach other eyes.

So let me specify what the experience is like. (And I should point out that this is the second time I have to write this. My first attempt – mysteriously – just vanished half my essay at the point of publishing.)

This weekend, I received a number of server log hits (all of them 404 responses, by the way, the stories are no longer on my server) to the 14th essay in Montaigne’s corpus, that the taste of good and evil depends on our opinions. There are two version of this essay and the first batch of hits were on the "alternate version" of the essay, the one that did not appear in my book "Essai by Essay."

So, as I often do when receiving random pings like this, I went back and re-read the essay. I thought it might be valuable to have it on one of my sites, so I posted it here. It didn't receive any of its own traffic, so I just went on with my other writing.

But on subsequent checks on my logs, I noticed that the other version of that essay, the one I did publish in "Essai by Essay" was getting hits now too. I didn't know what to make of it, I just made a mental note. How am I supposed to interpret this? That the reader is interested in Pyrrhonism and wants me to write more? That they liked the arguing-with-myself style of the first essay, but also the way I brought in Charles Taylor and Virginia Woolf to the second? Or maybe the way I described my shifting state of mind in the published piece? Or maybe the reader just likes the title and wanted to signal to me that I'm being too judgmental about some ideas – or maybe even people. Maybe her/him ... who knows.

So that's one example. The second came in a ping this morning. I noticed a ping this time to an image – the same one I've posted above. It was from a scene in "Drive My Car," a quiet, tender moment early in the film where Kafuku and Oto discuss the death of their daughter and the choices they've made since then.

This morning ping, curiously, came from Singapore. I noted early in my alternate take good and evil essay that my decision to revisit an earlier esssay and write a new version was due to a ping from Singapore. But there's another curious connection. I have been writing the past two days about segments in Dekalog episode 6 that repeatedly return to the hands as signifiers – a couple caressing hands, a woman calling a man's hands gentle, nervous motion of hands, the erotic use of them, and then finally, self harm inflicted by them.

Was my reader, this Singapore pinger, noticing the importance of hands in Kieslowski's scenes and nudging me? (And I must note, again, that I need to rewrite from here because the essay has cut me off and deleted again.)

A few years ago, I went out to lunch with someone I had known for a couple years. It was a beautiful early September day, so we were planning to eat outside at a restaurant near my apartment. I took my dog with me. At the restaurant, I was going to check if there were tables available outside, so I passed my dog’s leash to her. As I was doing so, our right hands brushed gently against one another.

Other than hugs, so common we often forget them immediately, this is the only physical contact we’ve ever had.

Erotic charge hits us in unexpected ways. Many years ago, a woman who I likely never would have considered encountering in the way she desired effectively seduced me simply by running her index finger across the back of my hand.

These were the sensations that haunted Proust, the moments when the body decides what our minds cannot reconcile.

Life gives us a flood of data and sensations. We can choose to trust our feelings and intuition about our experiences — and risk the delusions that might follow — or we can minimize it all as randomness. It’s our choice, to see the world poetically, filled with unspoken meaning, or to float silently, in a cold, uncaring universe.

Unless we are so fortunate as to have our bodies decide for us — freeing us from the burden of knowledge.