During the long course of twelve years studying Latin, my cursus honorum (which, incidentally has led me absolutely nowhere: but this is Dark Age Britain, not Renaissance Italy. Education here is meaningless, except for being marginalised and resented by the foreign brutes and ignorant juvenile clodhoppers that lord it over me at my workplace) the rubrics which I have had to answer have all been straightforward. If one asks a simple question, it is (more or less) straightforward to answer that question. Today we were given our first glimpse at the first two assignments. These are not historians, classicists or archaeologists: these are lawyers. Therefore nothing is ever simple. Although I am able to grasp the nuances of Latin, and am becoming ever more accustomed to the rules of ancient Greek, the law, however, is not quite so straightforward. I admit, I am unable to grasp even the most rudimentary meaning of either of the two assignments. This is because they are set in the future, only being able to be attempted until the student has worked his or her way through the units and blocks.
Why is this important? Because any reading one does (and there are a stack of books which are taller than my little Cantab' terrier standing on his hind legs) one is unable to take any notes. If a man (or woman) does not know which port he (or she) is sailing to, no wind is favourable. I admit, the weight of reading is bearing down on me like the empyreal firmament and starry heavens, held aloft by Atlas himself. I will do well, of course, because I am a keen scholar. Yet how I am to go about doing well remains to be seen. I have an Achilles heel: books. As Emmanuelle Seigner said in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate "I like books.". Yet I must adapt if I am to survive. I may be a gnarly old scholar, but I am not quite so old as to not be able to adapt.
Moreover, it does not help that this bloody Latin commission is a right pain in the backside (because of the scribal abbreviation), and as though that were not enough: because Bligh and his oompa loompa are off searching for breadfruit, I am to work all hours God sends this week, leaving me little time to read, research and translate.
On the up side, I discovered Breaking Bad yesterday, which I found was absolutely hilarious in places and also quite touching. I remember reading in Katherine Williams' book Criminology that popular culture tends to foster a liking for crime, and I always have this thought in the back of my mind as I watch shows or films about criminals. One ought to keep one's feet on the ground, and remember that drugs, particularly crystal meth, have a detrimental effect on society and have broken many otherwise well-kept homes. To paraphrase Aristotle (in his Politics), statecraft, the maintenance of a good state, is not much different to good housekeeping. This is much like Clauswitz's analogy (outlined at the start of his book The Art of War), that war is nothing but a duel on a larger scale.
Let's see how we get on, eh?
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