all quiet on the cantabrigian front
the other night I found myself in a tableau fallen from the pages of some yet unwritten novel --
Scene: A dining room, dimly lit. One wall is covered in shelves bursting with enticing leather-bound tomes, all reds and greens and golds and browns, soft in the orange light. HUGH enters, stage right -- portly, grey-haired, a proudly Aristotelian, eccentric haiku-translator from Australia -- followed by THOMAS, his somewhat crazed Objectivist son, who dabbles in genetics for his daily bread. Seated around the table are a motley Cantabrigian crew: VICTOR, mathematician and Borgesian acolyte, AMANDA, a fiercely anti-deconstructionist Milton critic, ADAM, a certain wayward philosopher-logician, and MOI, neophyte historian unextraordinaire.
The conversation, drawn out over a four-course meal and a gratifying abundance of pudding, tumbles roughshod over vast and disconnected terrains of discourse: moral philosophy, proofs and refutations, ancient Japanese history, bibles and Buddhism, Aristotelian metaphysics, the nature and value of altruism, translation, Kantian legacies, causation, and the various constituent elements of lemon curd. There is port and Japanese sake; there is sushi; there is even cheese. And all the while the books watch silently over us and the eddy and swirl of our discourse: dissent, challenge, enquiry and good humour washed down with Moroccan mint tea ...
this evening I found myself ankle-deep in autumn leaves scrunched underfoot, the dusky sunset shading to nightfall, my fingers delicately entwined with those of a certain blue-eyed boy. between these two axes can be plotted the entire geometry of my present life at cambridge & it is so wonderful that posting is, accordingly, unduly scant. my apologies.