Friday, April 6, 2012

Spring break

I have a new appreciation for people who came from far away to study at Stanford and only had a week-long spring break to go home or take some kind of vacation.  I will have had three weeks by the time I leave California, and it has gone by so quickly that I do not feel prepared to start up another term yet.  Part of that is due to the fact that I had to spend a lot of time and mental energy on the process of finding a new roommate for my apartment (which worked out very well, I'm happy to report).  The upside of that whole process is that I've been motivated to do a lot of cleaning, organizing, and (moderate) purging.  This makes me feel very efficient and has the benefit of showing tangible progress: that surface was cluttered; now it's clear.

My other ongoing project has been writing a paper for a conference at Columbia, which will be a several-day stop on my way back to England.  The title is Victorian Philology and the Problem of “long familiar use” in the English Language.  My friend and fellow Victorianist's reaction to that title was, "Oooh.  I don't know what that means, but it sounds great!"  I'll take that.  :)  It's about Richard Chenevix Trench, the focus of one of my chapters.  Basically, he said that we should pay attention to the ordinary, everyday words we use.  If we do, we will discover vibrant metaphors and enlightening histories in single words.  In short:

As the sun can image itself alike in a tiny dewdrop or in the mighty ocean,...so the spirit of poetry can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an Iliad...On every side we are beset with poetry.


Nicely said, I think.  During my first-year review, one of the reviewers rather unexpectedly asked me why I found philology interesting, personally.  I had focused on selling them on its importance in Victorian culture...  What I said was that I like the idea that we are all speaking compact metaphors all the time.  And trust me, teachers of Old English still love to explain what you're "really" saying when you use certain parts of the vocabulary.

That's my spring break in a nutshell.  For the moment, I'm playing tour guide to a Cambridge acquaintance who is visiting Stanford as a potential PhD student.  A bit strange mixing my contexts, but I'm proud that my hometown and university have done their usual job of impressing with their beauty.

No comments:

Post a Comment