Thursday, February 08, 2007

Not a good line of thought to be having at two in the morning...

"Anyway, I was reading this arcane edition of this rather arcane mediaeval book, and I looked up, and suddenly I realised that the literary world in which I was immersed bore no relation to the one around me. It wasn't just that it was old. If I'd been reading Hamlet there might have been one or two people in the carriage who could relate. Sometimes you see pretty UCL or Goldsmith's girls reading Eliot and the like. Vergil, Beowulf, Chaucer, fine. But Reynard the Fox? At that moment I felt trapped, as if in a bubble or cocoon. I was overcome with the utter irrelevance of my intellectual life."

Italics mine. From this VUnEx post.

Replace "Reynard the Fox" with "translations of Ladislav Fuks and musings about private introductory Finnish lessons" and we're where I am right now. I would try to be defiantly proud, but that would just seem to be more isolating.

Ach běda mi!

1 comment:

Plaid Avenger said...

....this is important....this MEANS something!