I am not usually a fiction writer which is why perhaps I am an early riser, because when Simon is away and I write fiction in the evenings time goes so strangely fast that I am awake late into the night before I have even washed the dishes.  In Susan Stewart’s book On Longing she talks about the relation between the experience of duration and the experience of scale: a psychology experiment involved people moving little figures around in models of houses, instructed to imagine themselves that size and to make the models do what they themselves would ordinarily do in that space.  They were asked to keep doing this for about half an hour, but they were given no clock, just told to stop when they felt they’d been going for about that long.  Their sense of time turned out to be astonishingly proportionate to the scale of the model they were asked to work with: if they were working with a 1:12 model, they thought they’d been moving figures around for 30 minutes after 5 minutes; if a 1:24 model, it only took 2 and a half minutes for them to think the time must be up.  How strange!  This is so astonishing I’m not really sure I believe it.  But it makes some kind of sense of how fast time flies when I am writing stories but then I wonder, why are the people so little in my head?  What is the scale I am working with, since I thought I was imagining them out in the world, at a 1:1 scale, picturing the world as large as the world I live in?  Are they actually contained in a head-sized space - but then isn’t the world outside me also contained in the head-sized space in which I perceive it?
(Now my neck has seized up and I cannot write.  The first three chapters of the story I was writing are here.) 

How can aeneous mean bronze-coloured as in “brassy or golden green,” asks the classicist Shadi Bartsch?  Most of the replies to her question pointed to the copper in bronze that turns green when it oxidises, but that is a blue green, not a golden green.  For Homer, the sky was bronze, but was it golden-green, or the blue of oxidation? – and the sea was wine-dark, but was it red?  Are the Greeks really talking about colour at all?  It is as if one culture hearing an orchestra is listening only to the pitch of the notes, and another culture is listening to the sounds the different instruments are making, so a description of the sound an oboe makes is met with the bewildered response that is sounds like a description of C# yet surely the note is more of a A, and helpful scholars finally find a way of hearing it perhaps as a rather flat B flat.  But I like the idea of seeing the world less in terms of colours and more in terms of texture.  Not just any texture either, but the specific texture of how light reflects off objects – a world of varying degrees of shimmer and shine, depth and detail.  It makes me want to describe something as wine-light, thinking of the way the clarity of white wine in a glass is a particularly lit-up clarity, holding lightness as both brilliance and levity, and how this might describe the character of a person, just as another person could be described as wine-dark, with wine-dark depths you could get lost in.  

Brian Blanchfield takes what has sometimes been seen as a problem, that poetry is mostly only read by other poets, and points out that this suggests the act of reading poetry turns readers into poets, which could be something to celebrate.  Brian Blanchfield is a poet himself but such a brilliant essayist he has turned me into an essay reader, though I am not yet quite turned into an essay writer the way Jan Morris has turned me into a (sometimes) thought diarist.  If poets have had to be reassured about the tendency for poetry readers to become poets, philosophers, Agnes Callard reveals, have always set out “to infect others with our need to find answers,” describing the philosopher “as an especially needy kind of truth-seeker.  Like vampires, zombies and werewolves, we are creatives who need company, and will do whatever it takes to create it.”   I seem to be very susceptible to the infection and here is another thought posting that starts with a question Agnes Callard raises, this time in an article “Should we cancel Aristotle?”  The answer is no but not because his views on slavery or women’s rights are defensible, and not because they can be overlooked as tangential to his thinking, but because his culture is so alien to our own we can argue against his views with no fear of them being politically dangerous.  But this is how we should approach all views, if we could approach all views philosophically, as if every idea could be examined without fear of the political dangers not of implementing it but of even considering it.  We have a cancel culture, Agnes Callard argues, because we’ve got caught up in a messaging culture, in which “every speech act is classified as friend or foe, in which literal content can barely be communicated, and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to.”  So she calls for “the freedom to speak literally,” which I suppose is also a request to be listened to literally.  I was so interested, and quite persuaded, by this framing of the issue in terms of a contrast between messaging and speaking literally, it made me wonder where poetry fits in.  The literal is much more ordinarily thought of as the opposite of the figurative, the space where poetry finds its resonance.  But if poetry is the opposite of the literal, it is the opposite of messaging also.  I have now reached the beginning of the thought I was going to post, but only by already pruning off a few offshoots, and the thought itself is clearly going to want to branch out into quite a tangle of thinking so instead I will just stop and admire the surprising situation of poetry that Agnes Callard has made apparent, as it sits as the opposite both to the literal, and to messaging, at one and the same time. ​

Does meaning drain out of life as you get older, Agnes Callard asks, and nearly all the respondents say no, except for some of the younger ones, and me.  I answered emotionally, not logically, and even as I was answering yes, I was thinking but is a novel drained of meaning in its last few chapters?  Is a sonnet drained of meaning after the volta?  When we think of an untimely death, we think of someone dying too young, before they have lived the story of their lives, but the Romans were as likely to think of an untimely death as a problem of overliving, the idea that you could live past the time you should have died.  Call no man happy until he is dead, as if life were a story and you could go past the happy ending to a time when everything that made sense - the marriage to Darcy, the saving of Wilbur the pig - has become a source of regret, a dirty pig-sty with a demented, old pig, covered in cobwebs.  What do we mean by meaning, narrative integrity?  A sense that it matters what we do?  An emotional depth or resonance to the details of how we live?  Regret is an emotion that has at least as much aesthetic depth as hope.  Perhaps we can live on, suffused with regret, like a beautiful sonata.  Maybe thinking of life in terms of an aesthetics of emotion, rather than in terms of narrative and narrative structure, is a way of living in the present, rather than towards a future that is always diminishing. ​