Life and literature

It’s been ages again, since I’ve been here last. The spring has gone so fast.

I’m sitting at work, even though it is Sunday. I needed to get some documents printed out and finally finish the seminar paper for next Tuesday. Most of the seminar participants should have arrived in Finland by now and we are going to have the opening dinner in couple of hours. And a cruise tomorrow night. That’ll be quite fun – hopefully and with the weather allowing – since I’ve actually never properly seen Helsinki from the sea. Ferry trips to Suomenlinna – or Stockholm and Tallinn – just do not count.

So a few more days and then I’m going to head to the lake and the garden for a couple of days. I hope the weather continues warm, because I want to do some digging and lawn mowing and reading in the sun. I am looking forward to that.

I need to come back to town for a couple more weeks after that, but after Midsummer I’m so out of here. I think I’m going to vacation for most of July and August. Technically, you see, I’m not getting paid for those two months, so I don’t feel too tempted to work either. I’m really not that obsessed about work. No, no sirree.

I was going to work my butt off this year, but things have been postponed again. I was appointed to the office of the assistant in legal history, you see, which means that there will be bread and butter on my table for the next five years. So I will head to Frankfurt in September for the rest of the year and then come back and spend the beginning of next year still on the dissertation.

Even though I haven’t worked my butt off, I have still been quite productive. I have written almost as much as in the previous five years altogether. I’ve taken a literature class, which was basically for fun, but turned out to be helpful work wise as well. Now I finally have some idea as to what deconstruction, post-structuralism and the linguistic turn are all about. It was really good to participate once again in a course, where things are taught from the beginning and where one can ask elementary questions without feeling dumb. I discovered an active participant in myself and realised once more that one can’t produce innovative things unless one is really interested in the subject matter.

Yep, that course was good. Especially the last part that had to do with literary theories. And also writing the prose paper. The teacher really liked it, you see, and that hasn’t happened in a while. It reminded me of the time long ago, when I was an exchange student in the States. I had this course on Greco-Roman Civilisation – with the best teacher in the world, Pam Brown – and I remember writing an analysis on some ancient story about Odysseus’ bow, which name or author I can’t anymore recall. But I will probably forever remember Pam Brown telling me that what I had written was exactly what she had hoped that others would produce too.

I loved that course – and her Latin class, which I took as well. It was quite enough to make me hundred percent certain that history was what I wanted to do too. But of course I didn’t – for all the wrong reasons. Now I have been thinking about that again – the course, analysing that story, analysing the book for this current literature class and all those literary theories. Because Pam Brown’s class wasn’t really so much about history as it was about literature. Because I’m not sure anymore that history is ultimately meaningful either. Because maybe it is literature after all – and perhaps music – which is the answer. The way to discover the undiscoverable. Speak of that which cannot be spoken about. Touch the universe and the fears, which rule us.

Yep, yep, something to think about.

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Currently listening to: Treibhaus - Unsterblich