I shall sit in my library in my night-cap and powdering gown...
1) first of all, clearly the most relevant thing about the last month of my life is that I am currently wearing a striped nightcap that is edged with fur and has bells at the end. This is because one of my housemates, Rachael, is awesome and made me one over break!
2) classes start on Wednesday: I'm taking intermediate German (GESUNDHEIT!), Artes Liberales (a course on the liberal arts? YES.), Latin prose composition (O TEMPORA O MORES), Shakespeare (maybe auditing?), and writing my thesis...and of course bagpipes and highland dance. And working (stuffing envelopes has never been so glamorous!). Busy, but it should be fun.
3) applying to the University of Dallas for its program in Humanities! Wish me luck.
4) books over break! I actually got some reading done.
> The Divine Comedy (Dante): for my thesis, though it was equally "pleasure reading." I thought it was good in high school; this time around it was great. I came back from last semester, after two classes in the Victorian to Modern period (one in English literature, one in American), thoroughly depressed and even a little shaken. Carlyle, Arnold, Tennyson, Frost, Pound, Stevens--strong men with broken hearts, desiring beauty (an impossibility) in an emtpy universe (the last absurdity) and framing that terrible, godless pilgrimage with such intensity and eloquence that it twists your soul to read them. And then men like Beckett and Stoppard, who at last have the honesty to give up the quest. Life is one long wait for death, so you might as well laugh and dance but it means nothing and you mean nothing and the universe means nothing. Hemingway's famous "nada" is over all. No wonder the Great Conversation falters, when even the indignant 20th century monologues to the void trail into silence and the throb of telos wrenched from essence subsides into dull ache of coping with existence, the slow acceptance of final despair. Even your hunger for "truth" meant nothing. Atoms in the void. 2000 years of sophisication later and we have returned to Lucretius, and terror is in his eyes.
Dante lead me back. Back to a world where the Great Conversation could exist because words and humans--and, incidentally, the whole universe--meant something. Back to a literature where a poet could say something that was beautiful not with the piercing elegance of framing an Absence, but with the thundering physical joy of describing that which is. Back to a place where the necessary logical conclusion of philosophy is not the abandonment of philosophy and humanity, things and ideas equally unmeaning, but the affirmation of both as participants in a greater dance, seekers together of the the End of Desire (and neither the End nor the desire denied). Back to a time before the broken heart had lead (as it always must) to a broken mind.
Back, finally, to a place where the search that we call life (and education) is not an eternal wandering--but a Return. Ultimately it may be that that is the only basis on which either can be justified.
> The Discarded Image (Lewis): pleasure reading. A fascinating and succinct summary of the medieval worldview.
> The Roman Triumph (Mary Beard): read for a paper I may or may not be working on. Anyhow, a very in depth treatment of what the triumph meant in Roman culture and how much we actually know about the ceremony itself. Great for hardcore classics nerds!
> The Place of the Lion (Charles Williams): Plato meets Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite...and 20th Century England. My favorite Williams book and my third time through it--another one that has improved with each reading.
Next on the list, besides school stuff: The World of Late Antiquity (Peter Brown) and Gilead (Marilynne Robinson).
I ought to be working on my application. What books have you read of late? :)