yearning

[helenic]

It always bothers me at revision time how much I actually enjoy studying, once I get into a rhythm. On Monday, when after four hours I came to the last lines of the Eclogues, I was moved almost to tears;

surgamus: solet esse gravis cantantibus umbra,
iuniperi gravis umbra; nocent et frugibus umbrae
ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae.

so unbearably vespertinal, and the surgamus like one awaking from a dream, and the anaphora of ite ... ite ... Virgil's language is profoundly, achingly beautiful, and here I was racing through it with a dictionary and a commentary highlighting and scribbling all over it. Why did I not set aside a week earlier in the year to bury myself in it, absorb it through my very pores, read everything on it there was to read? I experienced something similar with Horace in the afternoon, particularly when reading the Oliensis book, which was particularly useful as it commented on several of Henderson's ideas, and it is always good to be able to critique one's lecturers. Not only was the cleverness of his politics absolutely fascinating, but the Odes are quite simply gorgeous pieces of poetry - how evocative is

te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae
nescit tangere

in the ode to the Bandusian fountain, "the black hour of the flaring Dog-Star knows no means to touch you"; and the music of

me dicente cavis impositam ilicem
   saxis, unde loquaces
       lymphae desiliunt tuae.

Not only was I wishing I had three more days until my exam to really get to grips with it, read the commentaries thoroughly rather than skimming them (although I knew that if I'd had more time, I'd never have started) but I was gripped by desolation as I suddenly realised, after the exam tomorrow, I will never need to know this again. I would never again be lectured on Horace, supervised on him; I would never write another essay, never put what I was reading now and the ideas I was having to academic use. I am doing theology and Greek literature next year, so even if I do do post-graduate study it would be difficult to get back into Latin. And in that moment, it seemed incomprehensible to me that I would never read Latin again. Of course I would read it in my spare time; how could I not? The thought was impossible. I think I'd always suspected I would read and study for pleasure (the word study is derived from the Latin for "leisure", of course) but the desire has too often been obscured by the notion of work.

More than ever, I find myself yearning for the solitude and space of this summer - to set myself up in the college library each morning to read Luke and Acts in Greek, and to be able to get distracted by the English section if I so choose, to read Spenser and Beowulf and The Allegory of Love. I've been working next to the medieval literature shelves and it's been driving me crazy, especially since I've also discovered so much excellent Classical scholarship which I simply haven't had the inclination to look at before unless it was on reading lists for essays. As Ali and I have been half-joking to each other all week, it's a case of having all the resources in the world, but not enough time to use them. Yet it would be futile to resolve to spend my days in the library next year and read all my texts by Christmas; the work I've been doing lately has been rarified by pressure and sleep-deprivation, and I could not maintain it were it not absolutely necessary. Deadlines are the most un-motivating things in the world; I think I am by nature a literary grazer. I hope to do far better next year than I have thus far, because my grade will not be dragged down by translation papers and I will solely be doing things I have a passion for, with much more freedom of time, but I am not so naive as to hope to stop spending weekends out of Cambridge and four nights a week off my face and writing essays at 3am the morning they are due in. That is what Cambridge terms are like, and I would not have them otherwise. But I am very much looking forward to experiencing, for the first time, Cambridge out of term, the gold-and-green beauty of the college and the sunlit quietude of the library, without feeling guilty that I am missing lectures and choir and not being in plays and neglecting my friends and not socialising enough and socialising too much and never having time to go to the gym and never really catching up on sleep. I am looking forward to a lengthening of days, the hours loosening into late evenings and long afternoons.

Exam time is a strange, purgative period between term and summer, sleeping in four-hour stints in the middle of the night and afternoon, stumbling around fuelled by caffeine and fear; and then the messy blur of may week, sleeping between the hours of 7am and noon each morning and never quite having time to sober up. My parents sent me a good luck package: it contained chocolate, salt&vinegar crisps, Rolos, a pirated Kate Rusby live concert DVD, kazaa lite on floppy disk, my black poloneck that I left at home (so I resemble my icon even more now - hurrah!), £10, and a trilogy of appallingly bad novels called A Land Fit for Heroes that I was obsessed with when I was twelve. They are set in an alternate universe where the Romans never left Britain and narrates the rebellion of the Celts, involving lots of forests and ancient British paganism and mechanical dragons and air cars and faux-Classical references. They make absolutely perfect no-brain reading. I rang them to say thankyou and discovered that my mother has a new job as a hospital chaplain - it's perfect for her, as she used to be an excellent nurse, and it finally means she can leave the awful parish which is anti-women priests and which she was sent to by mistake. I love my parents dearly, and am looking forward to seeing them when they come up later in the month, but despite that I am more than glad not to be living with them again until Christmas.