radfrac_archive_full

A recent (but prolonged) ambition met: I have finished Daniel Deronda, albeit with some vigorous skimming (so fallen am I). I was going to go right on to Silas Marner, but I think I need an interval of some other, probably later and more minimalist, century's prose. Prosewise I feel as thought I have eaten a number of ropes coated with molasses.

Eliot is a bit of a paradox for me so far. Her characters are fantastically vivid in my mind, and live on there in retrospect. Casaubon, Dorothea, Ladislaw, Lydgate, Rosamond; and now Daniel, Gwendolen, Mirah, Ezra/Mordecai, Grandcourt. Reading the book that puts them there, though. It's not that I don't enjoy it. It just seems like a dauntingly elaborate spoon for the very good soup.

( Spoiler for classic 19th-C novel. )

Anyway, now I am reading The World Without Us.

( Reading list from the Lost Course, and tentative plans. )

Tuesday leirdal came over to receive the two Women's Press books I scored on the dog trip. They are not scifi, so I pass them on to her. Only the grey gradient for me. Zebras and sundries go to her. We must learn to contain our obsessions, lest they fall on us from a great height and we are not found for weeks.

"I'll feed you," I said, "But I have nothing in the house." Except, it turns out, fresh tomatoes and prosciutto from Ottavio. With fresh sage on pasta. And hunks of bakery bread on the side.

Just at the end we talked about the thing I'd like to write about here, but am worried I can't get right -- the change in how I feel about death and endurance.

All insights apart, I find I can still be made intermittently miserable by a sore tooth (to be examined on Monday). But that is the difference between insight and practise. Once you know, you still have to do, and that takes as much effort as before.

{rf}