Thursday, April 22, 2010
Tired of Chaucer
I think it's happened. I've been reading so much of him over the past months that I've worn myself out. That's what happens with me, though. Whenever I read something, I familiarize myself with everything around it that I can get my hands on, and then I read it again--it's an immersion tactic, like going to Italy to learn Italian, or something. Right now, I think I could give a blasted lecture series on Richard II or John Hawkwood (who is totally fascinating, by the way; everyone should look him up...right now!). Thing is, I don't live in Medieval England, and I can't move there. So it's a huge leap for as manically thoroughgoing a reader as myself to go from 21st century 9-to-5 to 14th century court life every evening. So tomorrow I think I'm gonna rummage through the ol' bookcases and see if I can't find something I haven't read in a while, maybe something a little closer to my own century? Maybe the 19th, that's a fun one. Maybe I'll even go out and get something I've never read. I mean, it is the weekend. Suggestions? I know some of you have given me good ones before when I've been in this phase...Brideshead Revisited comes to mind, Janet. (I read that again fairly recently, before this Chaucer craze, and it was way better the second time.) No pressure, though. Believe me, I'll find something.
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8 comments:
Dearest Brother, I have something for you to read. Look for my sign upon the mechanical post.
...wut?
I, er, sent you an email.
The End of the Affair
AMDG
What you describe in your first paragraph is the reason that my children are really shaky on modern history, or, indeed, very much history that has A.D. (or the infamous C.E.) as part of the date. I start at the beginning and get so wrapped up in the Ancients that I can't move forward.
My word is mopsess. Maybe I could invent a language with these words.
AMDG
Oooo, good suggestions, all. (LB, I got your e-mail.)
Janet, that makes sense. I've found that on the one hand, the classics (as in "Classical") require more effort to get in touch with, their being so far removed from our time, place and language. On the other hand, it sometimes seems easier for me to stick with classics than to bother with what seems a "modern" endlessness to wild permutations of ideas. I mean, what the heck IS neo-classicism, for example, and how is it different from the Renaissance, or the Old Humanism, etc. etc. Just sticking with the Greeks, say, seems more simple in the sense of being foundational. Really, of course, it's not simpler at all. Also, there's no telling how many hundreds of stories that, say, Homer draws from which have not survived, so I allow myself more freedom to say, "Yes. This is the beginning." When it isn't.
We must murder our darlings in reading as well as in writing, I'm afraid. And that IS what it feels like sometimes. My own strategy has been to glut myself, like Duke Orsino. "If music be the food of love, play on; give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die." It kinda works, but the guilt lingers.
Part of my problem is that I am always asking myself, "What came before that?" I think I'll be able to understand what I'm reading better if I read what came before. If I start reading Church history, within a week I'm in Genesis.
AMDG
I feel that way sometimes, too. What interests me is where the rubber hits the road. There's an idea, and there's creation, and they mingle strangely. For God the "transition" is seemless: "Fiat lux et facta est lux." For us--whether just because we are finite, or especially because we are (now) sinful, there's always, as Tolkien says, "a frost in spring, a blight in summer..." and we fail of our purpose, but God does not. Genesis is the archetype, and it happens constantly--from Adam through Israel, from St. Peter through Pope Benedict XVI. Constant failures and fixes. Just pick an era, any era. But you have to know it to see it.
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