When I don’t read enough literature I get tetchy. Itchy. Hungry. Like I’ve been on a South Sea voyage subsisting on lard-and-sawdust biscuits. And then I see an orange. You know that scene in the Winona Ryder version of Little Women when Friedrich the German philosopher brings Jo the orange to eat while she writes? And it’s the best present ever because it’s 1870-something? I felt a little disappointed when he gifted her his volumes of Shakespeare in the new version. But oranges and Shakespeare serve the same purpose—they’re curative.
In terms of reading, this week has been bizarre. In one class I’m reading Heidegger and his version of the history of philosophy. Here’s a taste: “All entities whose Being ‘in’ one another can thus be described have the same kind of Being—that of Being-present-at-hand—as Things occurring ‘within’ the world. Being-present-at-hand ‘in’ something which is likewise present-at-hand, and Being-present-at-hand-along-with [Mitvorhandsein] in the sense of a definite location-relationship with something else which has the same kind of Being, are ontological characteristics which we call ‘categorical.’” If you ever need to get out of jury duty, there’s no surer way to sound insane than to read Being and Time out loud in a German accent super fast. (You’re welcome.)
For another class, I read Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. When I needed a break from Heidegger I’d spend some time with this novel about a Harvard freshman in the 90s, all the things she is charmed and annoyed by. The narrator is obsessed with language, starts learning Russian, and sees her problems in terms of Turkish verb tenses. When she meets a twenty-six-year-old who feels nineteen, she thinks “nineteen still felt old and alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.” I’m still learning to feel eighteen, most days toggling between twelve and forty-seven.
And I’m reading this crazy statistics textbook from the 60s. So in addition to my neologistic German treatise and my self-conscious teenager novel I’m now reading about Poisson distributions and Gauss distributions and quadratic formulas. Starting to feel a little schizophrenic yet?
That’s how I was feeling yesterday afternoon. No more Statistical Treatment of Experimental Data! Please, no more of “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics”! Even The Idiot, which is supposed to be about someone in a similar time of her life to me, wasn’t satisfying. I needed an orange.
So I sat on my couch, in the sun, with tea, and started to read Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. My mom read it last year and told me how good it was but I never got around to it. And it was exactly what I needed.
