Delicate Marvels

ILL and Recovering

I've just passed though a long, quasi-legal, semi-legal process. It has aged and exhausted me and left me with a tinge of understanding of PTSD.

But the weather's spring with more than a tinge of summer; the young green in the trees the way I saw it as a child when I hadn't seen it very many times, and the sun on the leaves, a white-yellow shining, and the air, soft and cushiony. I want to wrap myself in the air and my shoulders in comfort. The fruit-tree leaves and the occasional lone clutches of pencil pine in the hazy blue distance put me hazily in mind of Rome – I think of re-watching HBO's Rome but don't have quite the – not energy, not time, though I haven't got the energy and I haven't got the time  –  The screen is a distance away; the story won't wrap me closely enough. And then there's the screen's proximity to the kitchen's space and activity and noise.

There's a good enough novel about Catullus I wouldn't mind reading again, but the local County Facility hasn't got it any more, and a novel about the C4th century poet Claudius Claudianus by a Dutch woman – fascinating, it seems to see everything from underneath – but the local County Facility hasn't got it any more.

I could get them from Inter Library Loan. But my shoulders immediately slump, the tension oozes back into my stomach and throat. I'd have to fish around on the net for the titles and authors; I'd have to find them in WorldCat, order them from this spot on the website I can't quite remember how to find and read them in 3 weeks –

And though I probably would read them in three weeks in any case, these books are so far off the beaten track they get weeded they could be renewed often enough, at the local County Facility, to suit my need to be dilatory. Which is the point at this point – This is idle summer, or a hasty simulacrum of it; this is therapy.

ILL's so remote it changes your relationship to a book. Which is something I hadn't noticed before, except subliminally.

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Claudius Claudianus – Threshold of Fire, by Hélène Serafia Haasse (1918-2011).
Catullus – The Key, by Benita Kane Jaro.