January 2001
24.01.2001
24 January 2001, around 17.36.
Up, email, breakfast, coffee, read, library, chinaware (the only truly silent reading room available), room, books, lunch, library, Greek Literary dialects (using words such as ‘aposeosis’ – is that an anachronistic Doric sigma? – and phrases such as ‘this text goes in for unnecessary iotas every so often’ and ‘it would be syntactically cruel of Alcman…’), a good-humored walk through the streets at dusk, tofu, coffee, The Invention of Athens, essay, Rousseau, bread & jam, bath, read, bed.
25.01.2001
25 January 2001, around 17.37.
Up, coffee, email, breakfast, library, Greek Religion – what role do the Greek gods play in everyday life? From whence and how did they evolve? What is structuralism? Are you a structuralist? Is Gallic subtlety any match for the brute force of History? – lunch, essay, read, breathe, bed.
26.01.2001
26 January 2001, around 17.38.
Up, coffee, essay, e-mail, breakfast, Hellenistic History with the public-school man – post-imperialist and orientalist subtexts in Greek literature after Alexander! – pretend not to suffer from nerves, lunch, Thucydides and Rhetoric (i.e., nearly two hours of sitting, staring at the floor and attempting to conjure an innovative opinion about Pericles’ funeral oration; also, if one lacks explicit proof that Athens was the new Persia one will only seem a fool for saying so), celebration, dinner, bed.
note to self (a) 9.iii.2004
28 January 2001, around 13.17.
When you reach that point when everyone says: ‘thank you, I’m not actually interested in you: just listen to my problems, they’re important, you know’; when there’s no one left to whom you can write and complain or even express yourself clearly because, in keeping back different pieces of yourself from different people, you are ultimately hiding your very self; then it is time to hide entries in the archives – safe where none shall read.