February 2021

A List: H. D. F. Kitto--Form and Meaning in Drama...............................................146/337

B List: Waugh--Brideshead Revisited.......................................................................125/351

C List: Carlyle--French Revolution..........................................................................650/727

I said I would finish Carlyle eventually, and I will. It is good. The gruesomeness of the Reign of Terror I at least did not always fully appreciate, on the one hand because the overall number of deaths was dwarfed by those the genocides of the 20th century, on the other because I imagined that the victims were almost exclusively politically combative and generally disagreeable middle aged men, not that I find their torturing and executing each other en masse to be an edifying spectacle either. For a while anyway the fury of the times descended into much more awful atrocities than I had realized went on. 

When I saw the H. D. F. Kitto book coming up on my list, I supposed him one of those forbidding German/central European genius scholars who came to the United States during the war and took over a humanities department at some university. He was actually British (H. D. F. stands for Humphrey Davy Findley) and taught at the Universities of Glasgow and Bristol. He lived from 1897-1982. He was a serious guy. In his book he analyses six Greek tragedies plus Hamlet. He expects you to bring your Greek with you while he spends 40 pages breaking down Philoctetes. It's never bad to go over these plays with a great scholar, especially if you have some familiarity with them, though this guy burrows so deep sometimes in his ruminations on the text, including lines he suspects may be missing or incorrect, or the poet's motivations not merely in presenting the great themes of his play, but on dozens of fairly minor details, that the overall points of his essays can be hard to hold in any kind of coherent view. Of Antigone he writes that "the human race...has unsuspectingly accepted this ill-contrived structure as one of its greatest achievements, without realising that it does not really make sense." To be honest his own writing has something of the same quality.    

Another month passes. I do have some nice winter pictures. 

On one of my walks, along the Contoocook River. This past week it's gotten really cold (this looks cold but this day wasn't that bad) and I haven't gone out.

6th birthday party.

The traditional birthday picture holding that from the previous year.

This blue house on the hill does not look that menacing here, but at night and in autumn especially it gives off that American old spooky house feel. 

My daughter getting hold of the camera during a snowstorm.

My older daughter made this. I like the smiley face. It's positive.

My wife gave me this reading lamp for Christmas. We don't usually introduce such modern looking things into the house, but I really needed some more light so I appreciate it. 

Another picture I took on my walks. My wife went to elementary school in this building. 

The Christmas tree came down, but the winter tree goes up so we can still have some cheery lights.

We went over to Vermont one weekend to find one of the birch trees blown over in one of the storms.

One of the birthday cakes. There are three of us with birthdays in January.

This was a beautiful place in Plymouth, NH called Rainbow Falls. It was about half frozen, and you see the water running in the creek under a thin top layer of ice.