glancing
Si causa peccandi in praesens minus suppetebat, nihilo minus insontis sicuti sontis circumvenire, iugulare: scilicet, ne per otium torpescerent manus aut animus, gratuito potius malus atque crudelis erat.
Perhaps the most enjoyable portion of my morning books is reading in Sallust and the Ancrene Wisse. That is in part because I do not expect myself to read much, a page or two at most. It is also because I do not expect myself to read well or carefully. Usually I do not look up the words I don’t precisely know, and I certainly don’t make an effort to ‘translate’ what I’ve read into anything like English. I get a sense, a feeling for what these authors are saying; sometimes that sense or feeling is less rather than more accurate, but usually it is not – when I have checked – that far off. Today, the parts I read in both books were about bad people; Sallust provided a partial inventory of Catiline’s calumnies, ranging from probable sexual assault to murder, while the author of the Ancrene Wisse relished the sensible signs of the wicked man (well, technically ‘þe lecchur i þe deofles curt’), who invariably has bad breath, dirty clothes, and ‘stinke to godd’. This superficial reading is perhaps a bad habit, but it does prevent my poor brain from becoming torpid per otium.