Friday, October 24, 2008

Aphorism for the day, from Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil:

It is a feature of marriages, including happy ones, that two people who live together may have quite false ideas of each other. This does not at all necessarily lead to disaster or even inconvenience.

Now that I've finished the Murdoch novel, I somehow feel that a refreshing re-immersion in the Aeneid is the obvious next step. My reading patterns are random and often repetitive, yet they seem to have a trajectory of sorts. Classical narrative poetry and Iris Murdoch's melodramatic, hyper-plotted, philosophical farces share a center-stage certainty as well as a formal elegance of tone and dialogue. Nobody really talks like a Murdoch character; nobody really talks like a Virgilian character either. But that's okay with me. My almost-eleven-year-old son, who is also a writer, is worried because his stories aren't funny. When I assured him that he was presently working in the high-serious mode and would probably be funny at some other stage, he beamed and immediately took my point. But then he likes the Aeneid too.

Guess what? Tomorrow night pro wrestling is coming to Harmony! Combined with Saturday afternoon's birthday-party home invasion, this weekend promises to be scintillating.

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