This quarter, I got very bad news.

• I learned about my cancer and started treatment for it.
• The treatment has been grueling.
• And it will get worse once the chemotherapy starts, but that still beats dying next year.

I also got very good news:

• I’m getting massive amounts of help with that, from healthcare and friends and family. German heathcare is good, but I seriously cannot (and need not) imagine how anybody, given only that, would deal with this the very bad news above.
• I completed the German translation of the fourth Sermon.
• My theory of consciousness got published in the place I was hoping for…
  • …and it didn’t receive too much serious criticism. If it is wrong or incomplete, which remains likely, it is at least not obviously wrong.
  • Of course there are people who object to physicalism on principle. Those didn’t like my attack on their favorite reason why they don’t need to accept that everything is nature; but I think they’re just wrong and I have better things to do than metaphysics.
  • I even got invited for an interview about that theory at one of my favorite podcasts, by Eneasz Brodski, who I’ve been a rabid fan of for a long time.
• I translated Kipling’s “If” into German.
• Although my health and treatments (and painkillers against the side-effects of the treatments) slow me down a lot, I worked on the German translation of the fifth Sermon. It now stands at 33 of 80 stanzas completed.
  • I’ll translate the sixth and seventh next, obviously.
  • But it is really time to seriously think about what poetry writing or poetry translation I will do afterwards. Nothing to announce yet, but I do have a plan and I enjoy that.
• I got to read, to a large-ish audience at a famous regular literature event, in German, an abbreviated summary of the first five Sermons, modified in order to not make the meditation aspect too obvious. Everyone seemed to like it, a few came to me afterwards outright ecstatic. This new version of the text should serve me well at future occasions where I might get to read out loud to an audience that brings less time and no inclination to meditate.
• I wrote another thing, in prose not in poetry, but also very meaningful to me. It should be published in a week or two. The writing helped a lot against the pain and fear, and what I wrote might help others too.

Still, the cancer is holding me back. That is also why this quarterly report is delayed. But the most important thing (completion of the seventh Sermon) and also the first video of the entire thing, was already in my extracurricular mid-quarter report so I guess it’s fine.