Epistemysics

Finished reading The Trojan Women today.  By Seneca.  Reading Astyanax saying the only line of his in the play, “No!  Mother”, caused an upswell of emotion in me that I had to consciously check.  To think, that something that old can still be emotionally relevant, is a rather hopeful and comforting thought.  Comforting because it shows that human nature hasn’t changed; hopeful because it means that human nature most likely won’t change in the future.

Had a desire today to buy One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian  Nights or whatever it’s called.  Shakespeare got some stories out of the Decameron, right?  Or something like that.  One wonders if the same could be said for Scheherezade (or however you spell her name).

1 and a half pages on the Thyestes review today.  Meant to finish off the scene but got caught up in the tennis.  0 pages on the Gross und Klein review.

Also, my 98 year old grandfather seems to be on the way out.  (We received a call from the nursing home saying that he was ‘slowing down’.)  Went to visit him today, not to say my goodbyes (I’d done that a long time ago), but just to visit.  Part of me thinks it was to give him comfort (though he was asleep for the entire time).  Another part wonders whether I did it because I wanted to be sure that I had actually said my goodbyes, even though I knew I was.  And a third, and probably strongest, part suggests that I did it as an observer of the event, the dwindling moments of life, the last ekes of sand.  When he goes it will be the last of that generation in my family.  Which means my parents are next in line.  That’s an interesting thought.

From what I can remember, he seemed – even with his dementia – happy that I was going to all these concerts and operas and whatnots that I am now.  One wonders about the progression of the generations of my family, with him in quite a bit of poverty at one point, and the family never particularly well off, and then my parents climbing up to middle-upper middle class wealth, and now myself, swanning about being literary.  I take my father with my to some of the concerts (as a backup when I can’t find a friend to come with me), and he said recently that he’s been, in the past 18 months, the most cultured he’s ever been.

Leaving my grandfather’s room, a reverent gloom still clinging to us, I turned to my mother and said (as we had been discussing it before we left home), “I think I’ll go and get petrol”.  ”Okay,” she said, “I’ll see you at home.”  And suddenly the mood had been lifted, with this introduction of the everyday necessity into the conversation.  If I ever write a scene in a play where, at the end of a tragedy, say, the character dies, and the family is surrounding them, and, after a suitable pause, someone breaks the silence and life begins to go on again, then it will be because of that moment in the nursing home, methinks.

Anyway, The Trojan Women was better than Phaedra, I think.  On to Oedipus.