Inspiration/Geekdom

Had the day off today (mostly - I went to Sean Gaston's seminar paper on Nancy, Aristotle and Derrida, which was beautiful), and while in the Post-Deng Cafe, eating sezchuan eggplant and gazing at photographs of Deng Xiaoping with small children and/or heads of state, I suddenly had two flashes of inspiration about how to manage the bits in Chapter Two that are still eluding me, which I scribbled down there and then. So that's a reminder that Thinking Requires Days Off, which is the most useful thing anyone ever told me when I started my PhD but which is of course one of the first things to go when you're feeling deadlined.

And now I'm back, through the rainy city, via a detour into the spooky, silent, glass-and-steel Law building for a copy of Heidegger's Introduction To Metaphysics (why was it there and not in the Philosophy library? I KNOW NOT), thinking to myself: You really know you're a geek when you hear yourself thinking Oh great! J won't be back for an hour! Time to sit and do some sewing and read more of Cicero's letters!

(Random Cicero thought: When I was being taught Latin, it was always stressed very heavily that the verb in a subordinate clause in indirect speech [a sub-oblique clause] goes into the subjunctive - in fact, that's one of the only Latin grammar rules I remember to this day.* Which has always been odd, because it never comes up in epic, and that's all I really read - but now that I'm reading Cicero I can totally tell why everyone went on about it so much; he does it about every five minutes.)

*the other is the world's least helpful mnemonic, via my dad: From nemo let me never say/ Neminis or nemine.