You lose concentration for one second...
Isn't it funny how even quite fundamental things about yourself can creep up on you unnoticed until some cataclysm brings them into relief? Take Latin. When I was 14 I had to read bits of Petronius' Satyricon at school, and it was murder. I should have been warned by the kindly inscription from the friend who had given me the book: "To Mel, Love Ewan. PS It's very boring and hard to translate". And so it proved, an agony of incomprehensible clauses and senseless word-order. I couldn't see how I'd ever be able to read it, still less why I would want to.
Well, then Catullus happened to me the next year and I was instantly smitten and the rest is history. But when I was clearing out books to take University I came across the Satyricon and decided to torture myself with a glance at the impossible Latin. I was astonished to find I could read it as easily as the newspaper. You could have knocked me down with - well, I'm no sylph, but certainly with a copy of Petronius. How had that happened? You'd think clues like passing higher exams and being admitted to Oxford to read classics would have given me some notion, but no: until that moment it had never occured to me that whether or not Petronius was fiendishly hard had more to do with me than with Petronius.
So yesterday I found out that the man with whom I fell hopelessly in love at seventeen is getting married. I frankly admit that I had expected to greet this news with howling and for the day of the nuptials themselves, whensoever, to be spent round at my friend James' house in my dressing gown drinking scotch out of the bottle for breakfast and with grubby streaks of last night's mascara tipping down my face. Not a bit of it. I am jolly chipper and even happy for the chap in question, since he is eminently husbandable material and will no doubt make great success of it all. I don't know where this cheer and equilibrium about the whole affair has come from, because I thought getting over him was about as likely as ever being able to read Tacitus, or see the point of Wagner. But as I sit here with my well-worn copy of the Annales at my side listening to a much-cherished recording of Siegfried, I suddenly see that such things can happen when you're busy doing something else.
Of course this process does also work in reverse. It's very easy to learn to do something and then to go round for years with the firmly rooted belief that you are a person who can, say, read the Greek language, only to discover that you aren't. At least in that case Greek is something with which it is possible, not to say pleasurable, to fall in love all over again. Ah, Aeschylus. It's like being seventeen again...
Well, then Catullus happened to me the next year and I was instantly smitten and the rest is history. But when I was clearing out books to take University I came across the Satyricon and decided to torture myself with a glance at the impossible Latin. I was astonished to find I could read it as easily as the newspaper. You could have knocked me down with - well, I'm no sylph, but certainly with a copy of Petronius. How had that happened? You'd think clues like passing higher exams and being admitted to Oxford to read classics would have given me some notion, but no: until that moment it had never occured to me that whether or not Petronius was fiendishly hard had more to do with me than with Petronius.
So yesterday I found out that the man with whom I fell hopelessly in love at seventeen is getting married. I frankly admit that I had expected to greet this news with howling and for the day of the nuptials themselves, whensoever, to be spent round at my friend James' house in my dressing gown drinking scotch out of the bottle for breakfast and with grubby streaks of last night's mascara tipping down my face. Not a bit of it. I am jolly chipper and even happy for the chap in question, since he is eminently husbandable material and will no doubt make great success of it all. I don't know where this cheer and equilibrium about the whole affair has come from, because I thought getting over him was about as likely as ever being able to read Tacitus, or see the point of Wagner. But as I sit here with my well-worn copy of the Annales at my side listening to a much-cherished recording of Siegfried, I suddenly see that such things can happen when you're busy doing something else.
Of course this process does also work in reverse. It's very easy to learn to do something and then to go round for years with the firmly rooted belief that you are a person who can, say, read the Greek language, only to discover that you aren't. At least in that case Greek is something with which it is possible, not to say pleasurable, to fall in love all over again. Ah, Aeschylus. It's like being seventeen again...
posted by Scarlet at 4:12 pm
1 Comments:
Perhaps the chipperness derives in part from your recent dalliances in the Anglican Communion. Only consider that, according the the Book of Common Prayer, 'mutual society, love and comfort' is ranked number three of three of the reasons for which matrimony was ordained (the first two being, if you recall, the soliciting of offspring and the avoidance of sexual incontinence). Not, I hasten to add, that the Romish attitude to marriage is anything to be smug about. We idolize marriage within the family with a fetishistic heterophilia, and especially the Holy Family, as model and ikon for all families. We also, if you recall, consider the H.F. to be made up of three celibates. It takes all sorts to make a world.
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