The Ideal

I've read exactly two works by Plato.  One is Cratylus, which is a debate about whether words are arbitrary sounds that we all agree to assign to objects or whether they have some inherent correctness in naming the things they represent.  It has lots of yummy quotable bits about how language works, and it's great for my dissertation.  The other work, which honestly was a struggle back in college, was Phaedrus. In it, Plato spends lots of time explaining that every physical object in the real world is just a spin-off of an ultimate, pure form or idea that exists... somewhere (I never grasped where).

At the risk of being obnoxious, if the Platonic ideal of the academic life exists, I may be living it right now.  The tourists have mostly gone away from Cambridge, and I have the month of September mostly to myself, with literally nothing scheduled all day but to get on with work.  Much of the time I'm accompanied by my best buddy here, Martin.  Here's a picture from when we went hiking in his hometown in July.  There are a few fourth-year PhDs who are quietly panicking in the lead-up to submitting in a few weeks, but otherwise it's very peaceful.  Perhaps too peaceful -- I'm not getting much done, to be truthful.  But it's nice to be able to sit in the stillness for a bit longer.

In order to stave off panic, I've drawn out a calendar on a single sheet of paper that lays out everything between now and winter break.  It makes it seem possible that I'll get a full draft of this unwieldy thing by December.  I'd just feel better if I were making more hay while the sun shines.  That's a purely metaphorical sun, by the way, because about a week ago, someone upstairs flipped a switch and gave us mid-October after beautiful shorts weather.  Sigh.  Still, even rain on the river is pleasant in the private silence of having a floor of the library to myself.  Except that my tummy is squawking right now, so I think I'll join the MCR tea & cake gathering that's starting in a few minutes.

Stay tuned for my next installment, in which I make up for the 'image crafting' to which this blog contributes and give you a pretty piece of music.