Overlapping experiences:
• have had a cold for three days, groggy and sniffling (sniveling? – that always seemed to be a different sound of course); every once in a while my face crinkles up, I mumble 'damn', and sneeze to one side or the other.
• the weather is gray and increasingly wintry, but
• it also has that windy liveliness that one associates with Halloween, which makes autumn so fascinating. (Is that merely the fractal shapes of masses of leaves blowing by? If beauty is merely fractal, how hard it will be to wax lyrical about it....)
• and a lot of work has gone well, things in my area are actually way ahead of where they were at this time last year, and even in some ways ahead of where they've ever been, but
• there are still clusters of things to do, logistics mostly, and because I've been so fast and aggressive about settling things with students and colleagues they expect those things to be rapidly settled also; then
• scheduling a meeting has been chaotic and unsuccessful, which has me distinctly exasperated; and on the other hand
• one of the anthologies is due in less than a week – I have some time to do it, but of course masses of anxiety, combined with
• the odd complacency that comes with knowing that whatever I do it will be finished soon, and
• longer-term discussions of projects floating through all of this, combined with having to make a list of my work over the past seven years – there is quite a lot of it – which is really rather satisfying.
Not to mention the complex resonances each of these bullet points invokes – even the sneezing reminds me of the HIV patient presentation on Thursday, where a student noted that I was already sniffling and asked whether I was paranoid about getting ill, or getting other people ill.
Of course this is the truth of living, much of the time – the pleasant and annoying, the good and the bad (last night reading Beerbohm and watching adult swim – a sharp contrast of high and low cultures, of the leisurely and the rebellious, the exquisite and the raunchy; plus experiences of good food and bad, interesting downloads and boring ones, etc. etc.).
That is what makes diaries so enjoyable, often more so than any novel or even essay – Woolf writing about her annoyance in meeting someone tedious for lunch, but overlapping it with her pleasure at the spring air, and her concerns about the printing press, all in one paragraph. Each thread tempers the others, without leveling the experiences of any of them.
Even realistic novels tend to cluster experiences in a falsely symbolic way – I get most annoyed with those dark satires where every experience, every detail, proves what a miserable schmuck the antihero is, and proves what a mess life is at every turn.
It's just not, of course, usually, really like that....
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