The Reading Diary

For all the world it seems like this place has become a reading diary. There's worse things to be and I keep finding things I want to say and even I eventually tired of finding fault with the Prime Minister. Sisyphus himself would have had no complaint with his lot if he'd ben offered that job as an alternative.

It's not in all such places, though, that one would find the autobiography of David Essex followed by The Aeneid. There is variety to be had as well as idiosyncracy.

I know I didn't spend much time with Virgil in first year Classical Studies in 1978/79 but now it seems I didn't even look at it. I'm well aware I went through university without doing any more than necessary but that first year was particularly undemanding. Only now am I filling in some of the bits I missed out of what might have been called 'an education' but it is mostly very enjoyable and makes use of the library upstairs rather than making the postlady deliver more packages. It might also be thought that 'education, such as it was, was wasted on 18 year olds anyway and many of these books are better appreciated later.

It's not possible to enjoy Virgil as a poet in any meaningful way at this distance, not in the same way that we might connect with a contemporary poet in our own language, but I'm tempted to accept all the great claims made forr him by W.F. Jackson Knight in the introduction to my 1977 Penguin Classic (95p). One is not accustomed to quite so more war, heroism and divine intervention in downbeat suburban meditations these days but the glow of whatever Virgil's poetry was like is still evident through the veils of this translation and moe often than one thought was likely one is struck by some metaphor or verbal invention.,

he was like a man who, as he puts his weight to the ground, finds that he has trodden on a snake lying unseen amid wild branches, and recoils as it angily raises the swelling metal-blue of its neck.

Snakes and routine human barbarism are more familar in this poetry than we expect to find in the dailiness of our lives in provincial England now but poetry wouldn't be poetry if it didn't do hyperbole and the agonies of Dido as Aeneas leaves her in Carthage under the direction of even greater imperatives than mere love are as heartbreaking as you'd want them to be.

I hadn't known what to expect or how far I'd stick with The Aeneid but it's been a great pleasure so far and is inlikely to let me down now. I would have thought the Eclogues and Georgics will be on their way here in due course. Maybe The Iliad might be worth another go after the desultory efforts I made with it all those years ago but I suspect The Odyssey is the preferred option.

Poor old Balzac, whose Lost Illusions, has been waiting up there on the top shelf for a few months now but he's had a fair go in the past. There is another John Burnside up there with it. One is tempted by the new Bob Mortimer memoir but I don't want to be the victim of the blatant advertising of the interview with Caitlin Moran last week. And then I see, looking beyond the duteous acquisitions of more Listener-style crossword clues from Paul Muldoon in the Autumn, there is an Oxford novel due from Daisy Dunn next year, which is bound to be enormous fun.

At the end of the month, a fine-looking programme of Autumn concerts in Chichester and Portsmouth cathedrals might finally establish the rhythm of what retirement was imagined to be and so I'll go back to stretching my limited resources of music reviewing vocabulary to beyond breaking point in the effort to express how completely great it is when the whole point of one's life is to get up and make one's way to such an event and then come back and make some sense out of the notes one's made. Maybe I'd be better off just listening but, as with reading books or what Socrates said about the unconsidered life being not worth living, I wouldn't see the point of doing any such thing without having to think of what to say about it.

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I didn't send The Times crossword in this week. While I'm not ashamed of using my OED, an internet word finder or even, at a push, Dan Word, I'm not going to try to get the book token prize when ACOEMETI was one of the answers. I would never have got that and, if they take the trouble, they might take the hint that the lack of an e-mail from me last week was a protest against that being too hard.