The agreeable eye

an eudæmonistarchives

07.03.02 – Thursday

This is the way things are, then. Writing mediocre, unimportant essays, listening to Verdi and hoping they’ll all just stop singing & die already. Either that, or reading Boccaccio’s Famous Women. Which I enjoy. A great deal. However. It is procrastination. Yes. How reading medieval Latin texts came to be a form of procrastination I’m not sure I’d like to know, but it’s true.

Read a book this morning. Quote: ‘Erôs is a verb’ (p. 17). Because, you see, it’s all about desire. Desire is that space between where you are now and that thing (or person) you think you want. Except you don’t really want it. You want to want it. This space, by the way, is triangular. There’s you, there’s the thing (or person), and then there’s that other thing (or person) that prevents you from ‘having’ the thing (or person) you desire. And you want to stay, eternally, in this state of wanting this want of this thing (or person). So you want to stop time. And that, of course, is foolish, unwise, and unnatural. Or at least I think that’s what she said. Anyway, the book’s about archaic Greek poetry (you know, Sappho, et al.) though it manages to quote Sophocles, Aeschylus, Plato, the Palatine Anthology, Homer, Basho, Rilke, Auden, Foucault, Virginia Woolf, and a bunch of ancient Greek novels, among other things.

And it’s about sex. So — if such things are of any interest, go out, read it, enjoy.

I am being deliberately obnoxious this week. It’s a pity, really


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