rust unburnish’d
The sort of lazy Sunday on which one has to work because one was having a sort of lazy Friday and a lazy Saturday, but Monday will come with its deadlines, and one does not like to disappoint. Somehow, last week, I managed to write my to-do list on the wrong day in my planner, putting everything one week ahead, and the resulting contrast of a page too blank and a page too full upset the order of things and made it difficult to uncover right action. So, in addition to tracking some dubious changes, I only made time to keep up with The Faerie Queene and Tolstoy’s Cossacks, a comfortable pairing, but unexpected. Crossing things off as I get to them.
Only on Saturday was I able to make progress, at long last, in reading the first volume of a history of the Polish and Lithuanian union, the chapters of which are often as not named for towns in which treaties were signed that tended to cause more problems than they solved, because they were unimaginative, or because their future interpreters were more excessively so. I was hoping for information about how paganism worked then, but the book seems more interested in politics and border raiders and levies of dubious success, as well as the historian’s occupational perk of judging one’s predecessors, medieval and modern alike. So many personalities. A very bowre of blis.