Extra-Curricular Activities
In which I slowly begin to actually appreciate having emerged from the end, not merely of the year, but of my undergraduate career.
On which subject: you know that you're in trouble when you start slashing the authors (or, in my case, editors) of one of your main research sources. Especially since I don't normally go in for RPF, at least not unless it is sufficiently historical enough to avoid squicking me out. This is the benefit (or perhaps the downfall) of being in the field of Classics: sources over a century old are still perfectly valid. Fortunately, as my thesis is quite done, this doesn't really matter so much any more, but it was starting to grate on me when I was still about a week out from being finished.
The Characters: Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt
The Time: circa 1900
The Setting: A small room tucked away in some corner of one of the colleges of Oxford. Packing crates are stacked nearly to the ceiling all around the sides of the room and even on top of a few filing cabinets and storage shelves while others sit on the ground, their lids pried off and their contents half emptied, evident not least in the handfulls of straw scattered across the floor. Several items of period clothing lie scattered about atop the straw: academic gowns with rather more wrinkles and dust that would be considered appropriate by university standards, as well as coats and the contemporary ancestor of the neck tie likewise in states of some disrepute. The shelves and cabinets are all properly shut upon their precious contents, thus the only evidence that the crates contain papyri dating back to Antiquity is a moderate sized sheet of the material lying upon the room's central table---the visible corner of which is covered in a neat hand of Greek letters---and several smaller fragments mixed amid the straw at the table's feet. A sound, as of a man shifting his weight, and then:
`Oh dear. We really ought to be more careful. I fear we have inflicted at least as much damage upon this one as time itself.' The speaker stoops to collect the tiny pieces from the floor.
`How bad is it?' his companion asks, carefully sitting up and gingerly hopping off the table; he examines the largest remaining section, on which he had just been lying, and reads over the new ending of the text. `There's still about thirty lines here. The final argument is mostly gone, but who needs a chorus of dancing satyrs, anyway?'
On which subject: you know that you're in trouble when you start slashing the authors (or, in my case, editors) of one of your main research sources. Especially since I don't normally go in for RPF, at least not unless it is sufficiently historical enough to avoid squicking me out. This is the benefit (or perhaps the downfall) of being in the field of Classics: sources over a century old are still perfectly valid. Fortunately, as my thesis is quite done, this doesn't really matter so much any more, but it was starting to grate on me when I was still about a week out from being finished.
The Characters: Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt
The Time: circa 1900
The Setting: A small room tucked away in some corner of one of the colleges of Oxford. Packing crates are stacked nearly to the ceiling all around the sides of the room and even on top of a few filing cabinets and storage shelves while others sit on the ground, their lids pried off and their contents half emptied, evident not least in the handfulls of straw scattered across the floor. Several items of period clothing lie scattered about atop the straw: academic gowns with rather more wrinkles and dust that would be considered appropriate by university standards, as well as coats and the contemporary ancestor of the neck tie likewise in states of some disrepute. The shelves and cabinets are all properly shut upon their precious contents, thus the only evidence that the crates contain papyri dating back to Antiquity is a moderate sized sheet of the material lying upon the room's central table---the visible corner of which is covered in a neat hand of Greek letters---and several smaller fragments mixed amid the straw at the table's feet. A sound, as of a man shifting his weight, and then:
`Oh dear. We really ought to be more careful. I fear we have inflicted at least as much damage upon this one as time itself.' The speaker stoops to collect the tiny pieces from the floor.
`How bad is it?' his companion asks, carefully sitting up and gingerly hopping off the table; he examines the largest remaining section, on which he had just been lying, and reads over the new ending of the text. `There's still about thirty lines here. The final argument is mostly gone, but who needs a chorus of dancing satyrs, anyway?'