She’s down on the street, and she says it’s a good bargain. The woman on the second floor shakes her head and makes a sleepy downward swat of the hand to signify disagreement. The woman on the fourth floor shouts down and asks how many there are. The woman on the street flings her right arm upward, generously, praisingly, and says there are enough. A woman on the third floor points out the distant plains to her baby, whose mouth drops open in surprise, allowing her to spoon in some porridge. The baby shakes its head. A child tugs at the curtain next to her and looks down at the street. The baby is distracted into another mouthful.
The woman on the balcony upstairs is crying, low humming moans punctuated by sobs; I can see one of her hands spasmodically grasp the splintery wood of the railing will the other covers her eyes. A second voice croons; it seemed at first just the hum of the rain, but it is a sound of comfort. The hand on to the railing begins to relax.
Just around the corner of the building, in the new sunlight that comes after the sudden brutal summer rain, three boys are playing at the drinking fountain, collecting puddle water in a glass, diluting it at the fountain, and flinging the water at a garage door to form endlessly new patterns that wash away with the next rain. An older brother rounds the corner, shakes his head and says it’s not allowed; he continue on towards the center of town. The boys decide to use a discarded water bottle instead of a glass.
A trailer has brought a car from the Kapan road; it is a Volkswagen, new and silver, but the front is crumpled and three of the tires are flat. It pulls into the driveway of the apartment building, next to the dark Ladas and Zhigulis and pauses. A woman leans out of a third-story window and shouts at one of the boys, who shrugs and continues playing. The trailer backs up, across the almost empty road into the police station compound. Three dogs disagree in the middle of the road, just next to a fan of cigarette butts and other detritus washed out of the gutters by the storm.
When the sun is shining in the morning it is warm enough to drink coffee on the balcony with a book, perhaps something on regional politics, and listen to the swifts cross the sky. I had thought at first they were starlings, because the starlings paused on the wire linking the apartment building to the police station, but after watching them for a few mornings, it seems they are swifts after all. At nine o’clock one can see the last of the schoolchildren running desperately to fifth school, anxious glances darting back to the loitering policemen, or perhaps even further behind to the parent darkening a doorway or window. One can follow the progress of the sun by watching the bedding – mattresses and pillows – move from balcony to balcony, plumply perched on railings, soaking in the sun, from east to south to west.
We make the rounds, going from house to office to house to office, from tea to coffee to tea again with fruit and runny syrup. Mostly we talk about the weather. It is a never-ending source of conversation. The weather and health are the sacred fonts of social feeling. One is always cold, or has just caught a cold, or is recovering from having caught a cold. It’s an excellent excuse to practice one’s tenses.
We have winter two times here: once before spring, and then again after spring.
The room is warm and smells of expatriates, a peculiar blend of locally unavailable spices and foreign laundry detergent. There is a pile of completed books by the door, dwarfed by the stacks still unread beneath the window in the opposite wall. I am finishing up a few things I’ve been meaning to do for many months, small projects, minute tidyings, a scribble here and there. I thought I’d lost a handkerchief, but I hadn’t. There is coffee in a thermos and milk – carried 68 km, aseptic packed, from the nearest market that stocks such things – in the fridge, which has been turned on in deference to the unseasonably warm weather.
On Sunday it was warm enough to air the bedding, the sky blue and clear, ice thawing on the roadway. We stacked everything outside in the sun, wool-filled blankets and mattresses fluffed and drooping, feather-filled pillows plumply perched on the balcony railing. We groom the bedding, turning it, rotating it to absorb air and sunshine, the smell of smoke and winter. Toward evening, we bring the bedding back inside, the mattresses softer than ever, the blankets rested and ready for sleep, and everything soaked with soporific freshness.
And a fog settled over the village.
In the morning we wake to the sound of the neighbor’s two cows walking up the road to pasture. They walk slowly, as though their feet hurt. That’s at about quarter after six. The temptation to stay in bed, rather than venturing into the dismal cold of the room (especially shocking after a night of rain) is great, but overcome. The first person up makes coffee and sits and reads in the warmth of the kitchen (preparing even a small pot of coffee heats the whole room) for a half hour or so, with the kettle on for tea and laundry. In the half-sleep of that time, the pattern on the kitchen rug fascinates, geometric flowers and rectangles with eyes squinted shut.
By seven the water is hot and it’s time for breakfast: an egg boiled or fried (but usually boiled), yesterday’s bread, maybe some cheese or butter or even շոռ1 if we’re lucky. Sometimes we make oatmeal,2 but that hasn’t happened often. After breakfast it’s time for tea: one teabag lasting for cup after cup – saving on sugar and honey, and tea of course, since there’s no milk to make the difference; and we set a small load of laundry to soak in the washroom. Up to this point the morning moves slowly and it seems a small eternity must pass before it’s time to go to work. Around eight, though the family begins to wake and it’s time to put papers in bags and prepare a lunch if needed and put on shoes and socks. Even the neighbors are awake and phalanx upon phalanx of schoolchildren march down the main road, two blocks away – out of sight, but still within hearing. The light tumbles down into the valley through the fog and clouds.
We had mock language proficiency interviews the other day, just so our instructors could get a better sense of where we were in our language interview and whether they need to panic about our chances of passing the actual language proficiency interview at the end of training.1 The format was simple, the first part being recorded: tell us about yourself, tell us about your host family, tell us about your plans, ask us some questions, do this role-play.
After the formal interview was complete, the interviewers reviewed our errors. Most of my errors were fairly stupid, and I was aware of them when I made them, but there was one rather consistent error that set me thinking: I was leaving off auxiliary verbs. This is not an uncommon learner error, but what troubled me about it was I was completely unaware that I was saying, for instance: ես ուզում իմանալ… (yes uzum imanal…: I want know.)2 instead of ես ուզում եմ իմանալ… (yes uzum em imanal…: I want to know). I am not unaware that the auxiliary is required in certain tenses and if asked to read or listen or write, would notice or include it without fail. So why was it disappearing (or failing to appear) when I spoke? Assimilation is partly to blame, I think, especially in the phrase I used as an example: too many /m/ sounds. Otherwise, I leave it to theorists of language learning to sound clever about my confusion.
Another thing: so at the end of the interview, when the examiner was reviewing my errors, she said to me, ‘I understand that you’re thinking in English and then translating…’ and that got me thinking, because I didn’t think it was quite accurate. I wasn’t thinking in English so much as I had a mess of meaning (apart from language) that I wanted to communicate; the thought itself (or the meaning) was not in any particular language, and when Armenian failed, my brain supplied German,3 and when German failed, only then did my brain revert to English. It felt like I was dipping into my pool of language knowledge to find the means of communication, and due to the limits of what I have been able to learn, was coming back dry, in Armenian at least. Thus if I were asked, ‘what do want to say,’ I would have an English response, not because the original thought was in English but because English was the means by which I was able to express it.4
The family cow ate some noxious weeds and fell and was butchered. The neighbor’s dog ate five of the youngest chicks and was thereafter executed. One chicken wandered into the latrine and drowned. Ten chicks mysteriously died in their box. For the anniversary of a death in the family, they slaughtered a sheep, slitting its throat to the spinal cord, its legs twitching like a dog asleep. The sad-eyed white dog watched with her pups.
In October and November the apples will be as large as a fist and sweet to eat. Now they are the size of cherries and bitter or sour, as chance strikes them. The cherries are sweet from the tree, red and cream colored. The apricots are ripest and juiciest and respond to bruising with increased sweetness. This cannot be said of most things.
The rooster runs across the bare uneven ground towards the barn like a samurai from some black and white film you can half remember seeing, sunlight pooling on his rusty black feathers.
In the kitchen there is hope for another cup of coffee, thick with sugar, and lavash with a hard-boiled egg, yolk apricot-colored, and a pinch of salt.
But the chariot waits outside the church and there is no stay, even for the purple.
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every change is born a new hope of finding a way out. A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape.1
– Kierkegaard, Either/Or
(but taken from The Seducer’s Diary, p.6).
How the body when ill sweetens the taste – of water, for instance, or broth, or tea – even as the appetite falters. All other food seems noxious.
Except waffles. This is a paradox.
Getting tickets for The Apartment
Unable to concentrate on anything more than a few feet in front of my face. Reading fine, computer okay, walking definitely out; sleeping only semi-recumbent; but better than yesterday, or the day before.
Started the new job today, the sort of thing that sounds interesting and civic-minded, but is merely ordinary: the good manager gone, no one understands the new equipment, the ‘we’ll muddle through somehow’ approach to training. A passage of time, of limited duration.
Come evening I tumble down to a local favored restaurant and grab a seat at the bar, put in an order for the special. I’ve had the menu ten times over and it’s good, but the specials rarely stick around for more than the night and are better. She brings the water, brings the tea, and the pintucks in her orange shirt send me back to my book of short stories, which in turn brings me to wonder why anyone is bothering to write novels, when no one has time to read them. Maybe in a hundred years, when the dust has settled in the pages and critics croon at the resurrected quaintness; at present it’s maddening.
The evening keeps moving in, leaving the cap off the toothpaste and crumbs in the bed.
Looking out the window of the coffee shop onto the overcast concrete, it seemed to have already become a picture, flat and filtered and filmy and flimsy. The sense of proportion was unmarred, but judging depth was a matter of relative position rather than perception, and a careless move might have scratched the surface, leaving a white mark and a void where the meaning should have be.
We bicycled four miles through the strange weather of a Portland spring (snow, hail, rain, and sunshine, all in the span of two or three blocks) to see a movie about torture.1 As a movie, I don’t have much to say about it; if the topic interests you, or if the current state of America interests you, then I suggest you see it, if you haven’t already, which you probably have. The most interesting part of the movie to me were the interviews with the servicemen who had been tried for misconduct and, mostly, convicted; these interviews interested me because these men work in my office.
Well. Not actually, of course, but it’s easy to recognize them, their frustration with lack of standards, the senseless things they are asked to do for too many hours in a row, the lack of opportunity to stand up to authority, and their ability to muddle through anyhow, trying to do their job without having much of an idea about what their job is beyond its irritations.2 If grand moral choices are made in such circumstances, the person who makes it will be out of a job before he or she is even aware that their choice has been made.
A modest example: I remember sitting in a meeting and listening to the manager say that ‘everyone was responsible for’ such and such a thing, which nobody liked to do and nobody, with the possible exception of the manager, cared about. When the manager asked if there were any questions, I asked how everyone could be responsible for the task: either everyone would run to do it (unlikely) or everyone would try to avoid it (the current behavior). I asked if some sort of hierarchy (arbitrary or not) of responsibility be drawn up, so it was clear who needed to do what when. The manager repeated that it was everyone’s responsibility that this thing be done, and there were no excuses. I rephrased my question, the manager evaded, and I got a talking to after the meeting about questioning his decisions.3
Please note, I do not think I was necessarily correct to question – in fact, I think it demonstrated my lack of understanding of corporate rituals; however, I do note that as a result of the incident, it was very difficult for me to care about the work I was doing or the ‘customers’ I was supposed to be helping – it cut the connection between the thoughtful, caring part of myself that had been showing up to work (foolishly, perhaps), and the mechanical part, which was really all that was wanted by my superiors. I was not paid to think, I was not encouraged to think and, ultimately, I decided not to think, not at that job, anyhow.
This is so far from being uncommon that you probably think it ridiculous to mention. I agree, I think it very common. I think it common where people are required to work in a system they do not understand, for goals they cannot achieve, in conditions they do not enjoy, for people they cannot respect. Of course I am not saying that actions of the soldiers interviewed in the documentary were correct or even defensible; but I think they were understandable, given the circumstances. It is a shame such circumstances exist, anywhere and everywhere.
***
Riding home on the bus from the beach, two men and a boy were talking about the army and the Iraq war. The men were Vietnam vets, weary, somewhat broken, and supporting the war because they saw there was a problem and felt that the military should be able to fix it. The boy was also a supporter of the war; he had just dropped out of the army (‘I ate free for a couple of months, so that’s good, right?’) to go back to school, join a frat, and spend the summer working for the forest service at $20/hour instead of $1000/month (and ‘you can’t drink in the army, and that sucks’). The veterans mumbled how military taught discipline and respect and that was good; the boy grunted, and said, ‘well, if you get money from it, that’s where I’m going to go.’
After a while the rhythm of the work took over my misgivings, and I could kill without a thought to anything but my technique. I wasn’t at it long enough for slaughtering chickens to become routine, but the work did begin to feel mechanical, and that feeling, perhaps more than any other, was disconcerting: how quickly you can get used to anything, especially with people around you think nothing of it. In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling (232f.).
[↩]
I remember being told by a
teacher not to read Jane Eyre, because I would be reading it in her class in the fall. Of course I read it that summer. Propped in bed, or curled in a corner, but finally finishing peripatetic. That’s how I remember it, anyway. I walked the three miles from Vineyard Haven to Oak Bluffs in the summer swelter. I walked slowly and slowly read, turning the thin foxed pages in their sweating dark green cloth, gravel underfoot. I walked and read and didn’t stop except for water and a bookstore. I walked until the road ended in a beach and then I sat on a stone and finished the last few pages. I remember looking at the sunburnt people ruddy against the white sand, the gray concrete, the gray ocean, the gray sky and feeling empty and complete and tired. I sat for some time. I remember looking at my watch. Then I stood and walked back to the ferry, scuffing my feet in the gravel and sand and thinking.
Up, coffee, tofu, e-mail, cook lunch, read book about world with no people, bicycle to work in the rain, make rude gesture at driver who runs stop sign at cross street, data entry, knit, drink hot chocolate, data entry, eat lunch, read book about emotionally confused people, shuffle papers, knit, shuffle papers, data entry, bicycle to library in the rain, return library books, pick up holds (4), pay fine ($1.25), bicycle home in the rain, check post (bills), dinner, coffee, e-mail, internets, read several different books, etc.
It’s windy and cold and it gets dark out early – and I am too lazy to read.
Begin to move in one particular way rather than another; whither that tends unknown. Looking for the clew; no minotaurs. Reminds me of that Turkish Night, all angles and crossed wires. I misremember. Miss remembering, not but that madness that way lies – or tells the truth.
Should stop playing with words like that; hurts the hands and the head and doubtless causes blindness.
From the windows: the sound like the sea in the distance, cars crossing bridges crossing rivers leading to the ocean; the sharp cold color of the hills; shadows in the ridges, and white glaring light off the southern side of buildings; rusty leaves and the smell of ground and rotting chestnuts.
Our little ship with paper sail
Sets out upon the sea –
A narrow nutshell for the boards
Holds us both in state;
And with brave splinter for a mast
’T will weather any gale.
We find under the weather a layer of sun, wrapped tidily around that parcel of time we call today.
The year therefore rounded itself as a receptacle of retarded knowledge – a cup brimming over with the sense that now at least she was learning.
– Henry James,
What Maisie Knew, ch. IX
Life is too short for this book which smells of potpourri and afternoons misspent in faded floretry. I cannot tell whether it is the cloying stink or the dullness of the matter (promising to tend where I do not care to follow: to gossip and muddle and the human failing of overestimated importance) that caused me to set this book aside. I will not give its title, because its particularity is not important.
It was foggy this morning; the afternoon’s bread & margarine and coffee helped clear the skies.
Under the window-seat in the back parlor, where wasps die and desiccate, the memories are kept, unlocked, unbidden, and inaccessible – mint-green florilegium, pallor bred under the western sun. The thought makes me sleepy.
fallen pears fermenting on the pavement
indecisive days too warm and too cold
leaden-eyed maidens drooping into evening
slouching easily on an afternoon bicycle
slumped down reading in a pillowed chair
The process of not writing has been a kind of sleep – fitful dormancy. I cannot tell if I am awake again – awake to the habit of writing, of typing, of setting my thoughts someplace other than the impermanent stream of the passing breath – cannot tell if this is not just another middle-of-the-night stumble for a glass of water and the euphemism. Time will tell.
At home in the evening, planning escapades. The books read and unread gathering coffee stains and toast crumbs. The at one time unimaginable, commonplace.
Things moving slowly. The sense of progress, though: gears turning, ticking well-oiled shiny. Intangible, unavoidable, inescapable. Backed into imagined corners that flatten and fade and open onto unexpected vantages.
Yet continuance – a stay or mainstay. Listening to Brahms again. Offering avoidances, but acting anyhow.
The way the light comes in through the window is soothing and satisfying. The nightclub pulsing somnolent below. And everywhere are bridges connecting to the known and unknown and unknowable. And I am sleepy.
The way they look and see and go. Unable to slip a word in edgewise. Everything all at once but different times; missed tones in the afternoon. Expecting all receiving naught. Or aught. But chancing not to see.
Finding out after the fact. A decade or so. Time not wasted, trim-waisted, but lost. Everywhere a door slightly slammed or a future’s paths uncrossed.
Peregrinations. Relative importunities. Imputed fragilities, and frailties. Ah so.
Apartment building, SE PDX.
These days I spend a lot of time crossing bridges. Partly because we moved across the river from practically everything we are interested in; partly because, well because my feet are getting itchy again.
It’s amazing how deadlines work – one puts things off, doesn’t think about them, and then the time creeps up when one either does or one doesn’t and usually one does.
And still one does not, no one does not in one’s heart believe in mute inglorious Miltons. If one has succeeded in doing anything one is certain that anybody who really has it in them to really do anything will really do that thing.
– Gertrude Stein
(Everybody’s Autobiography, p. 9).
NW Thurman St at 24th Ave.
It’s hopeless, I say. But what did you expect? Three square meals a day and a roof over your head. Well I’m going for a walk.
The trouble with epigraphy.
A fog has settled in for the winter and, although the café is warm and bright, the bustle and noise merely accentuate the drizzle and dark outside.
It is my favorite time of year.
It feels right to be inside, to be making things with my hands and reading books. Not as though there is something else I should be doing.
Intimations of usefulness.
Still life, with mirror.
It’s quietly raining outside, while I copy down transcripts for my intermediate English class. For the beginners, we’ll be talking about weather and listening to weather forecasts. ‘We want simple words, words we can use, red, blue, Monday, Tuesday, desk, chair…’ Let’s review, then, until we’re all blue in the face. It will make you feel better. It might make me feel better. Give us all a sense of success, achievement; let’s practice the better part of valor.
It’s raining and I left the windows open at home. I should close them.
Spring; each week brings a fresh wave of flowers, pollen & petals raining onto the pavement and windows.
Lately reading about Cyprus and mental maps. R.F. Holland’s book on Cyprus makes me lament the pricing of texts from university presses, as it is one of the few clear, readable, and yet highly detailed history books I have read in, say, two years or so;* it would be well worth the hundred dollars which I (and most people) cannot spare.
Also making lists. Lists of things to do, things not to do, and things not to forget. Not yet reached the point of making a list of things to forget, but soon.
* Which is not to say that it’s perfect; Holland has done quite a lot of work in British and American archives, but I would like to see more from Greek and Turkish sources (or even Greek and Turkish newspapers). Given the title (Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959), though, this bias is to be expected.
Because Hegel lived longer. Kierkegaard died young – for a writer; old for a rockstar.
Definitely old for a rockstar.
Relics of the book trade; but see also a more impressive collection.
O. W. Holmes, The Poet at the Breakfast Table:
Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems:
ibidem
H. W. Auden, Greek Prose Phrase-Book:
A. Kiesling, ed. Seneca Rhetor:
Newton & Treat, Outline for Review: Roman History:
Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of John Keats:
Charles E. Bennett, Latin Composition:
R. C. Seaton, ed. Apollonii Rhodii, Argonautica:
Waterfront park, ca. 6.30 a.m.
I looked, as if for the first time. I looked at people and at the order of things for the first time and I saw, I saw simply, and understood simply, understood with every last drop of me all of it – how people have set things up – isn’t the real thing. And so it will not be that way, because I do not wish it.
Martha’s Vineyard.
The rough brick wall bore in chalk the legend: ‘PROPERTY IS THEFT’; heedless, I read ‘PROPERTIUS IS DEFT’, which seemed a strange idea. Also, apropos of nothing:
He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the thin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals and an open-necked shirt.
Three chairs on the deck of the house opposite rock of their own volition, looking at the sea and seven sail-less sailboats.
The bright pink flowers of potted geranium plants refuse to lose their petals.
And I, sadly, am reading William Hazlitt.
There should be a pigeon.
Couplets for two ’sonnets’ I will never complete:
Leave me my quiet corner and my books –
Safe from the ways of men and their sour looks.
· · ·
Do not lament I write but of my self:
It is my all – I have no other pelf.
I call that day good in which I may spend the morning in bed reading Aubrey’s Brief Lives (cf.) and Cornelius Nepos.((A translation is available, too. Incidentally, I sometimes think that if I could choose to meet anyone in history for a cup of coffee or something, I would choose Atticus — but one can never be sure about such things and the sort of person one would really want to chat with has probaby been entirely forgotten, name and all.))
When Oxford surrendred, the first thing General Fairfax did was to sett a good Guard of Soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. ’Tis said that there was more hurt donne by the Cavaliers (during their Garrison) by way of embezilling and cutting off chaines of bookes, then there was since. He was a lover of earning,a nd had he not taken this speciall care, that noble Library had been utterly destroyed, for there were ignorant senators enough who would have been contented to have had it so.((Aubrey’s Life of Thomas Fairfax, Lord Fairfax.))
Failing that, though, I would settle for late eighteenth-century epistolary novels.
‘I mean, Thessaly wasn’t precisely on the cutting edge of epigraphy…’ said the student.
‘To coin a phrase…’ replied the teacher.
piscium et summa genus haesit ulmo,
nota quae sedes fuerat columbis…
A family of fishes clings to the utmost elm,
once familiar as a seat for the pigeons.
A fool might think they were beautiful, their white wings flashing in the sun, their rubid eyes sparkling. They are no longer content to perch upon the gutter, though, but settle on the window ledge, twisting their necks, writhing like serpents. They peer through the window, as though I were a fish in a bowl (easily dispatched), and seem to consider the top of the armoire as a prospective tenement. Soon they will want the entire room as well — cella nota quae sedes fuerat eudæmonistis…
Perfectly idle, reading Infinite Jest, which is not so bad as I remember. I finally got more than ten pages into it, which seems highly virtuous of me. It would have been more virtuous if I hadn’t needed to read Lysias instead.
Console myself with reading & umpteen cups of watery tea. Afternoons of such sweet enjoyableness are so rare with me that I tend to savor them, hold them lingering to myself, rather than share them.
Gainful toil + useful work = wasted time. No reading. Only joy in Monteverdi & a bit of Horace and Pindar and Epicurus (‘Send me a little pot of cheese so that I can indulge in extravagance when I wish’, as per Diogenes Laertius) and Epictetus (Τῶν ἡδέων τὰ σπανιώτατα γινόμενα μάλιστα τέρπει – Those of our pleasures which come most rarely are especially delightful).
Williston Library
Carrel-choosing at the Library — it seems to be one of the social events of the early fall semester… (Yours truly now the proud resident of of carrel no. 502 — fifth floor, by the window, one shelf away from Greek & Latin poetry, twenty-seven paces from Stendhal.) Up very late reading again.
Ineffably charming, oozing good humor & politic attention; I listen & ask questions—then run to the library and hide among my friends, their dusty spines bristling at imagined indignities.
Something like a gloomy day; morning in the library, then returned couchwards for coffee & short stories. The old brain could handle nothing stronger; I put it down to a slight overindulgence in Shostakovich string quartets yesterday evening…
Again, up early. Restless. Still reading the Letters of Rupert Brooke. Aside from having a perfectly splendid name and being a tremendously handsome (in the English manner, if you like that sort of thing) minor poet, I find he even manages to write amusing letters, about such interesting things as, well, life—which is nice (tho’ admittedly I’ve only got through 1908, and he was only twenty-one at the time…).
The first day alone; on my own. Faded grandeur of a forgotten self. Searching for lost books. Remembering old friends, neglected, of course, as they too often are. Baking scones, making tea. Existence in fragments. One cannot expect more. Even so.
Just a note: I realized what it was, that most important thing that I’d forgotten. No pretences, the game is over, the summer’s done. The hope of youth’s but a fond dream, and suits lighter souls than mine. Let us pretend no more.
To be more joyful, and border less on abject self-pity, I have taken to pillaging the shelves in my former room (now the library—which is apt) for books to take away; I fear my parents shall be left with hardly any modern literature at all. They merely smile at me, though, as I pilfer a volume or five, and are more worried I might abscond with Charlie Parker & Mahler’s Fourth.
I’ve had a strange thought, too; rather, a recurring memory, a repeated hit upon the wall of my conscious, a fact if you like, a coincidence: a copy of Homer’s Odyssey on my bedside table when I returned.
First snatch at solitude; how sweet indeed it is. I have missed (oh how very much!) the joy of waking to an empty house, all the silences responding to my footsteps, brushing away the dust of evening entirely at my leisure (which means, of course, I need not hide away in bed, avoiding the day’s probabilities).
It all comes down to a matter of contrast (if one wishes to deal with certainties). This dislocation springs, no doubt, from the abrupt difference of colors, the infinite bright variety replaced by a limited palette of infinite subtlety; a harsh chalk (or pastel) quality to the lines converted to a skillful watercolor. Even so, one cannot judge, nor really make apt comparisons; the brilliance of each would be undisputed, but they are so different in kind. My poor brain has gone all addled: I look for things, for people, that simply cannot be there—yet, strangely, am not disappointed…. Is it possible for lives to run parallel, keeping even pace alongside each other and only through a trick of perspective brushing closer at some distant point? It seems to me a rather artful construct, which robs it of much of its potential value as an image.
Walked along the trail up Hunchback Mountain for half an hour or so, before turning ’round again, leisurely ducking spiders’ webs and stopping to watch the flight of birds. At last, a moment wholly familiar.
The very light is altered, or simply different. There is an air about the place, this home, that both entices and fills me with foreboding. The normalcy of little things, scanning the shelves for books, toppling things gracelessly onto the floor, and yet so much has changed—furniture moved, or simply gone. Suffice to say…
Piling pebbles upon the beach, the water laps against the sky, the low sound measuring time’s loss, the imponderable construction of a memory. Set one foot, then, in front of the other, and take no moment to look back, but continue — onward.
One muddles oneself with thinking, succumbing too easily to the temptation to compare what is with what might be — learn to be insensate, let things, let people, be as they are, and do not expect what cannot be given.
Kerameikos and the haze of the Acropolis in the background.
Athens, Greece (31 July 2001; usual camera)
Delphi — up and about just before six to watch the Pythian sunrise, the bunched mountains and outcrops of rock losing their dusky shadow to the warm necessity of the sun. The trees in the valley seem almost lush, but dwindle to scrub along the harsh and rugged walls. A stillness through everything — even the air scarce dares to move. Then a low breeze, the flags pulse and flutter helpless against their poles, the movement of the fabric like the uneven footfall of an unshod horse upon the dust. And I do not know where to look, to the hills losing their cool shadows, or to the east, where I know the light will be. Slanting, the dull ratcheting of the sun into position, fine distinctions sharpening the angle, and a long line of shadow cast by stone. Then, at last, the smooth curve of the plain blushes under the sun’s caress.
I had been in a bad mood; then I saw this from the hills above Delphi.
Facing the famous Tholos at Marmara.
Delphi, Greece (24 July 2001; usual camera)
It’s deeply complex: it’s not what you see. There’s a tension between what you are and what you know. One must read behind the phenomena, the surfaces; one could take hours, days, months to comprehend one column capital, working over the surfaces with a magnifying glass in search of scratches. This is scientific. Then there’s the romantic view: maintain the established ruins, the picturesque. Sitting on the stylobate of the Parthenon, next to the second column from the SE corner (on the west side); looking out over the city, the Piraeus barely visible in the haze. Isolation. Balance and the beauty of design. Deception.
The ‘taking’ of pictures.
The plain of Plataia, north of Athens, Greece
(3 July 2001; usual camera)
Acrocorinth. One sees the world open out to the horizon, from the span of Attica to the slopes of Parnassus, across the tenuous isthmus, the Peloponnese now broken to an island by the works of man. On the isle of Pelops, taciturn rocks lie uneven as a rumpled blanket, jagged as a broken shield. From this height all sound has been absorbed by history; the shouting of one’s compatriots sinks into the silence, drowned by wind and sun.
My bag, outside the American School
Athens, Greece (3 July 2001; usual camera)
What is one looking for in these cases, anyway? One could find an object lesson, an unexpected symbol, but one is unlikely to find what it all meant; it is a void, then, and scholarship a waste of time? Perhaps. One little thing, this fixation on an object, whether worthy or no; wisdom and understanding is not to be gained in this manner — merely a collection of images, a gathering picture, a catalogue, all bare leaves and no explanation. This must be enough.
A Cretan Baetyl, eagerly defended by a large Canadian and a man called ‘Huge.’
Palaikastro, Crete, Greece (27 June 2001; usual camera)
We students were trotted up Lycabettos hill, an occasion for profuse
sweating and sporadic complaint, but the views rendered both bearable, the sun hesitating behind faint clouds, even Oedipus’ Cithaeron visible in the distance.
Listless running of errands and pre-departure nostalgia. I cannot find black
thread, but only a Swiss water-bottle that looks as though it should be used to
cause an international incident, which worries me. Returned my last books to the Ashmolean and sat for some time in the stacks, not wanting to leave. Well, five minutes, but that seems quite a while if one is sitting, feeling soppy. Shipped the last of my boxes, only owing to the good graces of the blessed clerk at the St Clement’s Street post-office, who re-opened after closing (at 1pm of all hours) just so my boxes could go out. It is a good thing, I think, to be polite and hopeless.
More packing. In a haze of irritability, especially when I consider how much pleasanter these last few days would be if I had only begun to send things home sooner. One of the pleasantest sorts of the idleness is that which gives the illusion of business, as all the world well knows. But this is ever the way of things, to know and to know and to know a thing is true and necessary (such as packing one’s things, ending a conversation, saying hello) and yet never doing them. Did find time to read a little book on Latin literature and go for coffee with J., H., and R. (& her inevitable boy). Returned late, from the smoky warm glow of the café through the clear air to evening.
More and still more work in the library, reading about god and trying to comprehend Epidauros, which just leaves me muddled. I find it frightfully confusing that there were at least four different (?) artists called Polykleitos working in the Greek world during the late fifth and early fourth centuries BC; it just shouldn’t be allowed. Still, feeling deceptively productive.
Bleh. still. Hesiod is some consolation, and I hope to show great sense about the Works and Days. Oh Works. Oh Days. Oh. Let’s not imitate Cicero.
People sat or sprawled on the lawns, soaking in the sunshine or lolling in the shade. I, meanwhile, was content to walk along the river bank and admire the scene, the hum of bees, &c. The rest of the morning passed amid thoughts of the ancient Greek aristocracy, kaloikagathoi, the beautiful and the good. Have been pondering my reading lately and am sad to note that I haven’t really been pursuing literature as I should — oh, I am reading Philostratus & Demosthenes & Lysias & things, but those just aren’t the same as James & Woolf & Geo. Eliot, & co, nor has there been an exhuberent loss of self, a deliberate rendering of one’s mind to subtle manipulation so common in modern writing. Began the afternoon with drinks at the principal’s house: near twenty undergraduate and graduate students standing awkwardly on the sun-struck lawn, holding glasses of tepid champagne, orange juice, and elderflower water at all angles, whilst attempting to mingle for the sake of appearances.
Sunrise of broken light, white through the varying gray clouds. Nothing unusual, watching the rain fall occasionally, listening to Monteverdi, browsing through the Historia Augusta. A useful day, but not out of the
ordinary, which, at times, is nice.
Friday. Morning in various libraries, reading about the second sohpistic. The
Bod LRR is shut from tomorrow until October, which saddens me a great deal: my last two weeks in England spent without access to its darkened portraits and harried classicists. Still, there are other libraries available, so I suppose I shouldn’t complain. I’ve gotten into the habit. Yes, it is a habit, and it forms character, shapes the mind into a rigorous academic… machine? For some. The finalists are finishing their exams, the weary, taut expression of the penguin people yielding to joy and relief with the red carnation. These are traditions, without which, well, it just wouldn’t be… Silly thing to write about, though. One might as well ramble at great length about the intricacies of memory (oh, yes, that’s been done too, hasn’t it?).
Up, tea, email, breakfast, library (kinship diplomacy), coffee, room, read, idleness, bed.
Up, email, breakfast, library (kinship diplomacy), coffee, museum, bookstore, post-office (stamps for letter & forms), room, read, St. John’s Passion, tea, read, Ninth, read, email, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Women in Ancient Persia…, email,
breakfast, letters, Athenian Culture, library (kinship diplomacy), library II (return book, renew books on Greek cults & borrow book on Roman Rhetoric), coffee, bookstore, bread & milk, room, settle, lunch, write letters, tea, Bach, Ulysses, &c., talk (dreadful and dull), room, bed.
Up, coffee, laundry, email, bread, Ulysses, tea, relax, bed.
Up, coffee, Baroque, Women in Ancient Persia (559 — 331 bc), Brahms, tea, notecards, Elgar, African Civilizations, brunch, groceries, room, Omeros, tea, continue reading, call M, Bach, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, breakfast, email, essay, snooze, deliver essay, room, bed, A Room with a View, talk to Mama, mint tea, drift in & out of wakefulness, sleep.
Up (after a night broken by coughing), coffee, Ulysses,
e-mail, breakfast, Bodley, coffee, pick up tickets, room, rest, lunch, room, read,
essay, rest, bed.
Up (after a night broken by coughing), coffee, Ulysses,
email, breakfast, library, coffee, pick up tickets, room, rest, lunch, room, read, essay, rest, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, email, breakfast, library, essay, tutorial, buy books,
coffee, purchase tea, room, tea, Ulysses, meet to arrange Latin, room, Ulysses, library (return books), dinner, room, bed.
Up (after a night of heated sleep, not tossing and turning, but trapped in
the stillness inimical to rest), coffee, Ulysses, email,
breakfast, library (return books & borrow Greek Prose Style), Athenian Culture, museum (return & borrow books), bookstore (check on religion books in cheap paperbacks), library (translations & TLS), email, lunch, room, tea, Ulysses, Bach, Tragedy and the Tragic, essay, bath, Ulysses, bed.
Up, coffee, languish (a sleepy stupidity tucked amongst the blankets, watching the light seep across the wall and hiding from the sharpness of out-of-doors), laundry, email (a process which, with some manipulation, can be made to consume an hour and half), room, coffee & sandwich, grocery store (for the purchase of weekly necessaries such as bread and jam), room, essay, idleness, bed.
Up, coffee, bath, Love in a Cold Climate (it troubles
me somewhat, being clever and charming and not especially brilliant, the characters remain, as intended I suppose, card-board cut-outs — Cedric, for instance, is an insult to one’s intelligence — though it is entertaining to ponder the actual schedule of the narrator), library (Greek Religion, etc.), brunch, e-mail, room, coffee, Fathers and Sons (I have at last actually set my mind to it and finished the thing, and find it is much more intriguing than I remember from my last attempt four years ago), dabble, Athenian Religion, Bach Mass in B minor, room, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), library II (read), library III (return book & photocopy), coffee & sandwich, room, read, class, which put in mind of Meredith:
…one is not altogether fit for the battle of life who is engaged in a perpetual contention with his dinner…
…which holds true for Thucydides as well; the reason it being generally so wretched is a matter of digestion, not lack of cogitation; even managed an exquisite civility to the disagreeable personages), library, check books, room, read, tea, bread, Bach, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), bookstore, coffee, library (request books), Greek religion (the importance of myth!), lunch, bread & milk, room, read, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Greek historiography, email, breakfast, library, coffee, milk, room, Thucydides Mythistoricus, lunch, Euripides as social critic (‘question authority’ — I can’t believe I skipped two hours of discussing the Boeotian elements of Pindar to attend), room, generally well-disposed to world and lacking any desire to indulge in excessive criticism (this state being induced by the lecture, Puccini, two slices of buttered bread and a cup of milky tea), Thucydides reading, more reading, the vague inclination (though not enacted) to bathe, bed.
Up, coffee, At Swim-Two-Birds, email, breakfast, library (return books), coffee, museum (periodicals, course reading), library (Thucydides, etc.), The Blessing, lunch, room, The Blessing, bread, Thucydides, bed.
Up, coffee, Greek historiography, Kagan YCS 24, send letters, breakfast, library (return books), Athenian culture (the oikos, the womens’ sphere, pederasty), coffee, library (return books, renew, and borrow Arethusa 11), groceries (bread, milk, etc., no honey), room, At Swim-Two-Birds, email, lunch, package, treats, novel, bath, At Swim-Two-Birds, bed.
Up, coffee, letter, Thucydides, coffee & lunch, bookstore, room, The Third Policeman, tea, bed.
Up, coffee, Ulysses, bathe, putter, send letters, email,
brunch.
Up, coffee, essay, email, breakfast, room, read, lunch, class (‘You’ve stunned them,’ this following a long silence when I’d read my essay; no constructive comments thereafter — no comments at all, in fact), sulk, room, tea, Ulysses, dinner with company, room, bed.
Up, coffee, ΑΝΑΓΚΗ in Thucydides, email, breakfast, coffee, museum, read periodicals, Greek religion (also, womens’ festivals…), lunch, room, essay, read, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Greek historiography, email, breakfast, coffee, museum, lunch, Greek literary dialects, room, out for dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, breakfast, library, translate, tutorial, lunch, room, read,
bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, Athenian culture and society (paideia),
library (return books, browse periodicals, etc.), lunch, room, read, essay,
bed.
Up, coffee, laundry, email, room, read, coffee, cudgel poor brain about grad school, muddle, read, essay, bed.
Up, coffee, read, library, coffee, bookstore (Die
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 2), brunch, talk, room, snooze, movie, room, relax, coffee, socialize, room, bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, library, read, coffee & lunch, bookstore, class room, smirk, read, bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, library, coffee, Greek religion, lunch, room, read, bed.
Up, coffee, Momigliano, breakfast, library, museum, essay, room, lunch, Greek literary dialects, library, essay, room, bed.
Up, coffee, Momigliano, breakfast, library, coffee, groceries, room, Athenian Religion, lunch, read, library, room, Satie, German, read, dinner, lecture, room, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library (return book), Athenian culture and society, library, coffee, groceries, lunch, room, tidy, bath, Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography,
Mozart, Athenian Religion, tea, snooze, bed.
Up, coffee, laundry, library (return books), coffee & sandwich, groceries (orange juice & instant soup), room, nap, idleness.
Snooze, up, coffee, library, J. E. Harrison (couldn’t
even manage a full hour…), coffee, bookstore (Themis), lunch, library (Divinity and History: the Religion of Herodotus; OCM), apple-mango juice, room, much sneezing & coughing &c., Chopin, read, tea, snooze, read, Satie, bed.
Up, coffee, breakfast, room, Herodotus, bath, Herodotus, library, lunch, library (return book), race to → class, room, bed & sleep & sleep & sleep.
Breakfast, library, J. E. Harrison, coffee, Historical
Methods of Herodotus, postmodern critical article on palm-trees in Attic vase painting, Greek Religion, lunch, room, bath, computer, Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, email, dinner, room, bed.
Up, coffee, essay, e-mail, breakfast, Hellenistic History with the public-school man – post-imperialist and orientalist subtexts in Greek literature after Alexander! – pretend not to suffer from nerves, lunch, Thucydides and Rhetoric (i.e., nearly two hours of sitting, staring at the floor and attempting to conjure an innovative opinion about Pericles’ funeral oration; also, if one lacks explicit proof that Athens was the new Persia one will only seem a fool for saying so), celebration, dinner, bed.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library, Greek Religion – what role do the Greek gods play in everyday life? From whence and how did they evolve? What is structuralism? Are you a structuralist? Is Gallic subtlety any match for the brute force of History? – lunch, essay, read, breathe, bed.
Up, email, breakfast, coffee, read, library, chinaware (the only truly silent reading room available), room, books, lunch, library, Greek Literary dialects (using words such as ‘aposeosis’ – is that an anachronistic Doric sigma? – and phrases such as ‘this text goes in for unnecessary iotas every so often’ and ‘it would be syntactically cruel of Alcman…’), a good-humored walk through the streets at dusk, tofu, coffee, The Invention of Athens, essay, Rousseau, bread & jam, bath, read, bed.
Saw a double herm of Epicurus and Diogenes the Cynic at the Museo Capitolino, which pleased me much in my soul.
At the Palazzo dei Conservatori, saw a herm of Alcibiades, which I thought particularly appropriate and a Roman statue of a toga’d man holding a scroll, whose expression was wonderful, though ineffable.
Later — Looking out over the city, a faint bluster in the air. The ruins, though sunlit, had a bleak familiarity. Curious to think of the personalities – Octavian, Domitian, et al. – who once crowded this now-barren spot. Flowers creep amongst the marble as children pry at bricks and mortar, searching for a souvenir.
Atop the Palatine, in the Farnese Gardens, oranges still clung to the trees and fountains bubbled in the winter light.
That is naturally a better reflection of my humor on that particular day than an apt description of the ancient remains.
Addendum: I found this quotation later. It expresses far more eloquently than I have done something of my experience of Rome:
My cappuccino was served, and for a moment I felt that having achieved this distinction constituted the supreme victory of my life. I surveyed the scene and immediately saw my mistake…
Wandered to the Villa Borghese, a rather large park containing such interesting things as the British School at Rome and the Galleria Nazionale d’ Arte Moderna. It being a sunny day, I didn’t much mind getting lost, and wandered past and around the Temple of Faustina with much amusement before finding the Viale delle Belle Arti, which leads – to a tourist’s eyes – to the Villa Giulia, home of the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, which – to extend the sentence further – was even open. I was a good child and saw the much-touted Chigi vase, with its early representation of hoplite armor. It was much smaller than I expected.
At the Protestant Cemetery, in the company of numerous over-attentive cats. I cannot help but feel, porter aside, that the cats are the guardians of the place, keeping the pigeons away, trotting amicably among the tombs. It is a strange place, calm, yet with a curious access to something else. There is the flutter of so many former personalities, bright strawberries grow around the neglected graves, and with the many-colored cats it seems quite merry.
To the Musei Vaticani in the morning; the streets were deserted and trees cast pale shadows onto the Tiber. Having not the faintest clue of a suitable direction, I wandered vaguely Vaticanwards and found I needn’t have worried: one can’t miss it. Waited in a rather long line for admission, then darted away to see marbles and vases. Oh, yes, and the Sistine chapel, too. Saw Pericles & Periander in a corridor. Never before have I been so happy to see a pair of tyrants. As the musem closed, tottered over to St. Peter’s, and was hustled in with everyone else. Too large. Too gray. Too much gold. Too many squalling children. The light pressing through the windows seemed more solid than the marble.
Spent the best part of the day sitting in and ambling through the Pantheon; one wonders what it must have been like before the later Romans came with their god and their saints, tearing out the older deities and the bronze rosettes for the baldacchino at St. Peter’s.
The Pantheon is on such a scale, one can imagine it the product of some heroic age. Yet even so, it is not monstrous; is does not, cannot, make one feel small. People wander through, heads thrown back, staring open-mouthed at the immense ceiling…
It is strange to think of an ancient temple as a modern church – the faiths are so different, not in magnitude, but in kind.
Tumbled out of the train station in a daze, only to find myself in the Piazza di Spagna, surrounded by people, tourists and Romans, worse than any cliché; and such noise and such bustle. The Spanish Steps and Keats’s house caught at a cross-glimpse. By sheer good fortune I managed to find my hotel within fifteen minutes.
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
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