Slightly less boring than yesterday. The usual routines of exercise, the track in the evening now filling with darkness, swooping birds, flitting bats, and flying insects. Man, 'Nam couldn't have been this bad!
Dinner. superb food but everybody seemed out of sorts. Or maybe it was just me. Much more likely. I probably died and didn't realize it. I was only half there, like some ghostly visitor from another world, mystified by the whole scene of domestic plainness and the rigid artificiality. Of course, you somehow think to yourself that all this fakeness will one day give way, crumble, to reveal some sort of resplendent truth, just the way you peeled away 12 layers of wallpaper in the old house, in the old country, Wales....
It's not just the falseness in one's voice; it's the nonsense one spews forth. Desert Fathers and stones in their mouth. Out there to escape the incessant chatter, babble, idle speculation and pettiness. Not the Syrian eccentrics, of course. Bake a cake. Eat and share it. Read a book. Spend some time praying or in the garden quietly going about your way...the sudden light near the library, this wild mixture of sunshine and shadow, reminds me a pure Sunday: late lunch, roast beef and mint sauce, then the Big Match...
A looked bored out of her mind, that vacant look, the flashiness gone from her eyes...as if she'd already been married for twenty years, or lost something of great value. The discussion wheeled unpredictably from jihadi violence to "experience", then back to DFW (who no no-one has read), then back to deadlines, how the department of politics was full of shits and losers (general agreement there), the mediocrity overflowing from their department like so much refuse that hasn't been collected in the winter months. H, probably a bit drunk, his voice full of condescension and a mild resentment, urging us to fight the good fight like a parliamentarian whip, despondent (or maybe just bewildered) that we weren't all true intellectuals, didn't see what was at stake here: "the university", "academia", I guess. My heart isn't in it. Opposite me: a very attractive and stylish foreign woman. I put on my liberal hat...
The kids, dazed by it all, unable or unwilling to share anything with one another, or play together (I don't know why that's always expected of children). They're supposed to learn how to be sociable, how to listen, mix, express themselves. But from who?
Dinner. superb food but everybody seemed out of sorts. Or maybe it was just me. Much more likely. I probably died and didn't realize it. I was only half there, like some ghostly visitor from another world, mystified by the whole scene of domestic plainness and the rigid artificiality. Of course, you somehow think to yourself that all this fakeness will one day give way, crumble, to reveal some sort of resplendent truth, just the way you peeled away 12 layers of wallpaper in the old house, in the old country, Wales....
It's not just the falseness in one's voice; it's the nonsense one spews forth. Desert Fathers and stones in their mouth. Out there to escape the incessant chatter, babble, idle speculation and pettiness. Not the Syrian eccentrics, of course. Bake a cake. Eat and share it. Read a book. Spend some time praying or in the garden quietly going about your way...the sudden light near the library, this wild mixture of sunshine and shadow, reminds me a pure Sunday: late lunch, roast beef and mint sauce, then the Big Match...
A looked bored out of her mind, that vacant look, the flashiness gone from her eyes...as if she'd already been married for twenty years, or lost something of great value. The discussion wheeled unpredictably from jihadi violence to "experience", then back to DFW (who no no-one has read), then back to deadlines, how the department of politics was full of shits and losers (general agreement there), the mediocrity overflowing from their department like so much refuse that hasn't been collected in the winter months. H, probably a bit drunk, his voice full of condescension and a mild resentment, urging us to fight the good fight like a parliamentarian whip, despondent (or maybe just bewildered) that we weren't all true intellectuals, didn't see what was at stake here: "the university", "academia", I guess. My heart isn't in it. Opposite me: a very attractive and stylish foreign woman. I put on my liberal hat...
The kids, dazed by it all, unable or unwilling to share anything with one another, or play together (I don't know why that's always expected of children). They're supposed to learn how to be sociable, how to listen, mix, express themselves. But from who?
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