January 28, 2014

Enough paint is up for me to be a little shocked by the whiteness of the white I chose for the walls. Sherwin Williams claims it’s plain, untinted white, but it’s an icy blue-white, like snow over a glacier. Decided to have no regrets.

Tolkien class. One energetic young lady admits she has no interest in–and rather dislikes- Tolkien, but wanted to take the class because she has created her own mythical world and all she really wants to do is talk about it, share it, extend it, and thought we might be an audience. She doesn’t want to do the assigned essays because they are analysis and not chapters of her own book. My first thoughts were that it must be dreadful and that kindness would be to read a little and tell her so, but, who knows? We dwelt several times on the slow and gradual accretion of Middle Earth, a lesson which passed her by. She and her friend are Mass Comm majors, and confided that regular prose irritates them because it is not like news writing, not fast and jabby and pithy. I don’t remember learning such hardened doctrine and acquiring such exclusive tastes in college.

Excellent lecture on Egypt yesterday. I’d despaired of learning anything new from the Humanities lectures– because I’d heard them all twenty times before– but this one had me sitting up with eyes wide. It moved toward not an enumeration of monuments, but a probing of the language, and hence the minds, of those who made them.

Early morning disquiet. Stomach upset, head a little achy from the drink I invented last night: prosecco and Cointreau. Overdoing it in the name of clearing the shelves before the move.

All things seem suspended, unable to move forward or to be forcibly pulled back.