Spent

It has been quite a day, I am bushed but haven't actually accomplished anything today. I several of the articles int he OA while preparing the soup and I read for about 45 minutes after dinner, being too knackered for a stroll with N.

Hans goes for a walk, ruminates on the nature of time, how unfamilairty heightens awareness and thus alls time to appear more gradual as each instant is novel. He also ponders a strange curiosity he felt for a peer at school. This coincides with a nosebleed and then as returns to sanitorium he attends aweekly lecture on how love can defeat disease. Apparently the material has less to do with pathology than a thinly veiled psychoanalytical dichotomy beween Love and Chastity, how Progress needs the latter at the expense of the former. The recollection of the near crush he had on the schoolboy stays below the surface and thoughts shift to concern about Hans' health.

Saturday afternoon we ducked into Harold's as I wanted a copy of Nabokov's Pnin that I had seen the week before. While there Harold asked me if I had heard of a German novel named The School Of Atheists by Arvo Schmidt. I hadn't and he ajourned upstairs to return and gave me the copy. Harold has been quite generous over the years but this struck me as odd. Schmidt died in 1979 and is being steadily translated into English. The comparisons are obvious betwen he and Joyce (Schmidt actually translated Ulysses and FW into deutsch) and I hope to read the challenging text one day.