It's a lot of fun being a geek.

Maybe it runs in the family. Despite friends' accusations that I look, act, and talk very little like my parents, maybe genes do count for something; because there're bits and pieces of geekdom scattered all around the family tree that must have somehow all become G33kd0m Dominant in me.

My granddad waxes operatic, my other granddad writes poetry in perfect Reverendian cursive, my Dad has a secret liking for anything to do with the Greek military, and my Thios David, my θείος David (he doesn't like being called my Uncle. Must be Olympian fixation with immortality or something) speaks Elvish.

Or at least he does a pretty good job of pretending he does, because I know for sure that the Sindarin phrases he posted on my FB Profile are from Google. I know this for a fact because ArwenUndomiel.com/Elvish.html used to be my favourite webpage, too- and with good cause!

Today Lisa and I went to the library to source out more secondary sources for our H3 Lit papers. It was going pretty well until I saw the Greek Classics section and Lisa made a beeline for the Young Adult Fantasy Fiction section. We ended up guiltily borrowing two Tamora Pierce books (her), one slim volume of Homeric hymns (me), and a book of Sappho's poetry (me).

To our credit, though, the next hour and a half or so was spent upstairs at the reference library being Fully Productive-- her thumbing through some book on political satire and the brainwashing of teenagers, and me wading my way through a literary criticism of Kerouac's On The Road (a lot of sex) and "Dionysus since 69" (...and again.).

Erik has a knack of snagging me at exactly the right (and occasionally the most annoying! ;) ) moments-- I was on my way down and out of the library in the left when Garbage started moaning "I'm only happy when it raa-aains" from my pocket and I picked up my phone.

To be honest, I was a little more than happy to have any excuse to head back up to the books again, though; and so in defiance of the Two Day Block, half an hour was spent very calmly and very well between shelves of Ireland, Go To Greece! and Othello and A Midsummer's Night's Dream.

... I can't WAIT for A Levels to end so I can just spend the whole day, glorious hours on end, in that library. God- sometimes I'm sitting there just reading and inside I'm dying little deaths of ecstasy- words, words, words, all voices whispering down the ages and forgotten places and the bronze jars in the corner of the temple. The Man was right- I love beautiful words telling me terrible things.

Like so.

----

" The human being may perhaps be unknowable-- unknowable and ultimately irrational. And we were warned of this thousands of years ago by the characters, the unappeased characters of tragedy-- who could not know themselves but who have called out to us again and again: "Remember me. Remember me."
We cannot conclude ourselves. We cannot bring our plot to an end. We are forever unresolved.

The need for truth, for self-knowledge, is profoundly human. That it may be out of reach, forever out of reach, is profoundly painful and equally human. In Dianeira,in which I used Sophocles' Women of Trachis as a basis and inspiration, Dianeira faces with bitterness the incomprehensibility of it all. 'It was all a waste of breath', says Dianeira wearily as she kills herself.

Is this a bleak end? I am not sure. Because if you look at, write, see in performance the unknowable human being, you will not close off with the conclusions that have brought so much destruction on our world: you will not insist- even to the death- that this is the right way to love, this is the political system that works, and you are the one who knows best.
You will wonder at the human being as Sophocles asked us to in the second chorus of Antigone--

Wonder
at many things
But wonder most
at this thing:
Man..."

- Dionysus Since 69