O O O, beloved readers, the pale and toothy abysm of the empty entry-box. It's enough to make me shirk my diary for days. Well, that and the gorgeous rupture of the soil which seems to be going on outside. There are still no leaves on the maples outside my window, tomorrow, however, will make me a liar.
I feel wonderful: and it has to do with not having to go to work, I fear. I feel, also, poetic. (Beware! -- the next step is to fall in love, I should think, but I haven't anyone to do it with.) Indeed, I am seething with strange impulses, impulses which make sense only within personal narrations of who I might have been. You need examples, don't you? I would like to hop on a bike and ride out to the lake, watch the ducks play, sketch them in colored pencils. I would like to move to the country, listen to the crickets from the front porch of my house, eat waffles at one in the morning. But I don't have a bike, and I would miss the light from the streetlamps on the trees, and I would hate to be as alone as one is in the country in July. So no villegiatura for me; I will wake up tomorrow and try to find a quiet, pressed-shirt kind of job which requires dreaming in tune with the air-conditioning and in time to the thump of a copy machine.
That Catullus person said it thus (on returning to Rome in the springtime):
Iam mens praetrepidans avet vagari
Iam laeti studio pedes vigescunt.
and who am I to disagree? English'd by Sir Richard Francis Burton, it says:
Now lust my fluttering thoughts for wayfare long,
Now my glad eager feet grow steady, strong.
To which I add, in reference to the poet's homecoming, lines from All Hail West Texas, the latest Mountain Goats album: "And I want to go home / but I am home." You see, there is mixed both happiness and dissatisfaction, in an innocent sense: hearty appetite, eager feet.
When I was growing up, I was not at all taken with the rather old-fashioned genre of Young Boy's Fiction. I had a certain appreciation for R. L. Stevenson, but basically only by way of the Child's Garden of Verses, which is sickly and decadent in the way of Victorian childhood. I read Buddenbrooks and The Turn of the Screw when far too young, and became prematurely grave, prone to ennui. What I ought to have read with more enthusiasm was the whole genre which encourages fine young lads to go out and make something of their lives. This ends with G. A. Henty or the Biggles books and starts with the Iliad. [Note the decided homoerotic cast of the genre: perhaps I'd have learnt how to have a strapping great boyfriend, too, and we could wear tweed, smoke pipes and hunt elephants to our muscular hearts' content] How much better off I'd have turned out today if my favorite, wisest authors hadn't whispered in my ear that the world wasn't worth it, and all the military glory and economic success in the world couldn't feed the worm i' the rose-bloom. Well; the damage is already done: I am born to languish. I had better settle in for a course in remedial optimism and hope that I can salvage some Realpolitik out of my aesthetic, beauty-is-useless childhood.
Current music: the first act of Cos� fan tutte.
Current mood: reflective, melancholy (of course!), nerveux, expansive, magnetic.
Current reading: Christoph Wolff's essays on J. S. Bach, Mandelbaum's Metamorphoses, Thomas Mathews' survey of Byzantine art, which is lively, beautifully illustrated, but a little condescending (when it isn't throwing unprepared jargon at one). I can, however, thoroughly recommend Mathews' earlier book, The Clash of Gods, which despite its evocative title is only an iconographic history of Christ, as philosopher, mage, god, and emperor, during the first six centuries of Christian art.
Current food dream: pur�e of blue lentils, fresh dilled baby carrots, and pommes � la duchesse, all with a nice light Vouvray.