!Negligence --- agk's diary 29 November 2023 @ 14:59 UTC --- written on ThinkPad X61/HP Pavilion vf15/Model M in quiet kitchen while Evy's away modeling and daughter sleeps at Ruwen's house --- Agnes Heller (1929-2019) wrote philosophy for 70 years. In 2010 she wrote A Short History of My Philosophy, critically reviewing her major books, papers, and lectures of the previous 60 years. It's refreshingly unsentimental and clear. It was how I decided where to enter her vast ouvre of pol- itical, moral, ethical, aesthetic, and philosophy of history thought. I liked the idea of how, thrown into the world, a person cannot perfectly fit the space she ought to fill. Through meeting a decent person or persons in everyday life, she's faced with the existential choice of whtether to also be decent. Should she make the choice, she's then faced with the task of climbing the ladder, becoming who she is. So I started with An Ethics of Personality (1996). Heller's known for grounding her thought in every- day life, her work on needs, justice, feelings, and the responsibilities of individuals in modern- ity. In her short history of her philosophy, Heller discussed the impact of her blacklist after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. She wrote for her desk drawer, determined to think in a world that denied her colleagues or students, without expectation her thought would ever be encountered by another person. She did not write that at the time she had a 4 year-old daughter and a marriage 5 or 6 years from ending in divorce. I can't imagine her thought without the experience of motherhood any more than without the experience of being banned from teaching, writing, traveling early in her career. Despite her dogged focus on everyday life and attentiveness to relations with parents, children, teachers, students, colleagues, friends, law, etc., I think she had nothing public to say about the impact of having and raising two children, of being wife and mother, on her thought. My friend Ruwen is smarter than me, and also mother to a 2-year-old. She hasn't read Heller, but I asked her thoughts. Maybe, Ruwen hazarded, Heller was ashamed of being a body that bleeds, conceives, lactates, shrivels. It could be. Like Plato and Aristotle, Heller wrote deep masculine love for her teacher Lukacs, her students, friends, and second philosopher- husband. Maybe she resisted feminized embodiment. Unlike Plato and Aristotle Heller didn't act as if she had no family but her philosophical family. It was either her father or grandfather, who by his decency presented her with the existential choice to also be decent. She was clear that very few people need ethical philosophy's books, teachers, students, colleagues as she did. They need only encounter a decent person. Her father was killed in Auschwitz but she insisted ethics aren't formed, clarified, or realized in moments of crisis or impossible choice. Decency is realized in everyday life. My everyday life is almost entirely structured around my child, my spouse, a household that demands constant mainten- ance: tidying, cleaning, washing, shopping, cooking, and the child, wife, linoleum flooring, plumbing, major appliances, cars, and bicycles that demand care. Is anyone skilled at this work? It's a life mostly devoid of disciplined, system- atic thinking. In everyday life, I work one day a week, a nurse in a hospital to stabilize children and adolescents in crisis. The rest of the time I'm thrown into concerns that animated Heller's work, even as she was silent on the fact of our feminized life. My child's loud. I'm lonely for conversation. While Evy works in the economy for a wage tending hospital patients I do my task and neglect it. I'm deeply fulfilled and radically estranged from teachers, students, and colleagues. I don't even write for my desk drawer like Heller did in the late '50s and early '60s. I unconvincingly pretend I don't need to think any more. Didn't Heller share my difficult way? My negligence was invisible to me til open mic last night when I read from an unfinished novel I forgot about for 5 years. I found it digging in notebooks for something "new" to read. In the two notebooks filled with the partial novel is my sharpest, funniest, most acutely observant and embodied writing. Freed from motherhood's duties by Evy, I was for the first time able to socialize after open mic. Listeners found the invisible violence, comedy, and tragedy of their everyday lives in my writing. They *saw themselves.* Reflected, they picked up and told me details lost by their daily consciousness re-found in the mirror of my characters and dialogue. One listener challenged me like Heller's decent person. If I can write like that, why did I stop? How could I forget how much I loved those charact- ers, the world that shaped their possibilities, how dearly I loved giving them narrative life? I was climbing a ladder, attentive to this world's richness as I wrote. Then I got distracted and largely forgot myself beyond my utility and daily complaints. Heller was only 23 when her Zsuzsanna was born. I was almost 40. Maybe less life observing and thinking socially when she became a mother meant less to lose. Maybe her parents were more help in everyday life. Maybe communist Hungary in those years, for all its strictures on her ability to think socially, still freed her through childcare or other social benefits unavailable to me. Maybe it snatched away Zsuzsa to be raised by the state, something Heller could have experienced as a loss not a freedom. I don't think I can know. I don't think she told. Today, talking to Ruwen, I didn't want to go home. I asked her favorite book and wrote it down. I talked too much about Heller. When Ruwen said she was reading about Chinese Medicine I interrupted her to talk too much about that too, stealing her interests to remember mine. Specifically to remem- ber my teachers who once were as Lukacs to Heller. They left me tasks I once did, then forgot. This is my everyday life I have to be attentive to now. This womanhood gifts me with responsibility for a bold, strong, stubborn, needy toddler who loudly narrates every thought to cross her mind. This motherhood needs me to not lose treasures entrusted me before daughter's birth to the total attention she demands by the klaxon-horn of her extravagant existance. I want Agnes Heller to be my role model, but she won't. She says on the authority of Heidegger, Kant, and beloved Kierkegaard that my choice to become what I am, and my labor in service of that choice, is mine and mine alone. My flourishing, my ethical life, is not her job.