Remembered readings

 

When I came home from Sweden in December and entered into a ten-day quarantine before Christmas, I was partly preoccupied with filling up a new book case that my parents had bought for me. It was a long-sought-after opportunity to empty some of the numerous boxes that had been lying around the house in storage after my five years in Denmark - the eclectic library accumulated in the course of a PhD. This brought back a lot of memories from a time that was very different from the constrictions of a pandemic, a time of travelling, and the reading that always follows on travels. 

As I read a few dozen books each year, there are several of them that fall out of memory and little of those particular reading experiences has stuck. Others, however, I remember vividly, and some I remember because of where I was when reading them. And a fair number of books from this latter category I remember precisely because of the incongruous pairing of reading material and the place of reading. For instance, I remember reading a translated collection of poetry by Léopold Sédar Senghor, the president of Senegal from 1960 to 1980, while staying at the family cabin in my home village. I remember reading short stories by Fijian writer Raymond Pillai in a small hotel room in Paris. I have vivid memories of finishing the devastating novel Eve out of her ruins by Mauritian writer Ananda Devi in a cold flat in Alicante one December evening, while on my way from Alicante back to Denmark I read a collection of poems from the Norwegian fjords by Wilhelm Bødal. These are combinations of location and reading matter that have become etched into my memory precisely because they do not fit, because they stand out in contrast to one another. 

Among these different contrasts, the type that I find perhaps most incongruous is that which happens when reading in an airport. To my mind, airports are distinctly modern half-worlds, pockets of reality that correspond very little with the reality outside them. In this way, it does not take much for airport reading to become incongruous, to become marked my contrasts, to be memorable precisely because something does not fit. One such reading came to my mind as I was organising the new book case, namely the reading of Orosius' Seven books of history against the pagans.       

I was reading Orosius in the course of the spring of 2018, as we were having a reading group at the university where I worked then, and because of its compact nature I read this book over several months. I no longer remember where and when I began reading it, and I do not remember where and when I finished it (although judging from my reading list this happened sometime in April-May). What I do remember, however, was an afternoon in March where I was on my way back to Denmark after my first visit to Istanbul. I was sitting by the departure gate for some time, facing a vista of planes taxiing across the tarmac and occasionally picking up the distinct and unexpected sounds of Icelandic teenagers talking somewhere within earshot. The scene was so very different from the reading, which was a seemingly excited recounting of the deeds of Alexander the Great, in which the Christian author Oriosius, who claims to abhor the violence wrought by the pagans of past times, appears to be relishing the opportunity to describe how the Macedonian king jumped over castle walls and single-handedly slaughtered a host of his enemies. It was an incongruous blend of place and reading matter, perhaps made even more congruous by this particular passage, which, in so many ways, stands out as an oddity in Orosius' narrative, conflicting, as it seems, with both his self-proclaimed intention and his vantage point. But incongruities can be memorable precisely because they are incongruous, and in this strange mix of ancient and modern - in which were blended the translated prose of a Spanish fourth-century historian, the view of the Turkish Airline planes, the occasional call over the loudspeaker in Turkish, the chatter in Icelandic along with various other impressions - the reading material fastened in my memory in a way I had not expected, and I have carried this with me for much longer than I spent reading the passage in question, and even longer than it took me to read the book itself.      
 

For the time being

He was the surveyor of his own ice-world
- Geoffrey Hill, An order of service


With changing weather patterns, other changes follow suit. In my native village, Hyen in Western Norway, we see this in the way that the ice freezes on the lakes. The old patterns, familiar to me from my boyhood and recounted in the stories of my paternal grandmother when growing up, are now replaced by new ones, and we are re-learning the mechanisms by which the thickness of the ice develops. In conjunction with warmer and more abruptly shifting weather, this also means that there are two great uncertainties that preside over the winters: whether the ice will form, and, if it does, for how long it will stay. For the time being, it has stayed for the better part of two weeks, and I have made the most of it by taking almost daily excursions into this world of new perspectives and accesses, knowing that I am enjoying this for a limited time period, knowing that I don't know the extent of this time period in question. 

This uncertainty and this mutability currently overlaps poetically with changes in my own life. This week is the final week of my current contract, and after that I am again unemployed for an uncertain stretch of time, and one that hopefully is short. But until I know what my next step is, I am back home in my native village, and I will most likely spend the spring writing applications, working on articles, doing the kind of unpaid labour that is part and parcel of the academic life, even outside of the institutional payroll. For the time being, this is a rather pleasant prospect, in spite of everything. The past few months have been exceedingly hectic, as the normal demands of the working day has been exacerbated and amplified by the pandemic, leading to extra work and a student body more concerned and more stressed than they would be in a normal situation which is in and of itself stressful. I am now entering into a different pace, however, and while it is not void of deadlines or stress, it is a pace in which a significant part of my rhythm will be in tune with the landscape around me, it will consist of trips on the ice - if it stays - and the possibility of pressing pause to a greater extent than I could before. For the time being, this works, and then we'll see.  

The joys of aimless learning

 
As January draws to a close, I'm looking back on three-four weeks of very intense end-of-term work. In the Swedish university system - in which I am employed until the end of the month - the autumn term ends in the second week of January, while the spring term begins in the third week. Consequently, January is a month in which everything intensifies, because the grades of the latest exams need to be out of the way quicker than usual, and dissertations that I have supervised throughout the autumn are now being evaluated and graded, with all the extra admin and preparation work that this entails.

As January draws to a close, I'm looking back on the modules I have taught or to which I have contributed, I'm looking back on the dissertations I have supervised or evaluated, and I'm looking back on all the things I have learned as part of my preparation for my modules. I have learned a lot this term, also about myself, and almost everything I have learned has been for a specific purpose, be it a lecture, a conference, or for administrative reasons. On the one hand, this is of course a great boon - I know more going out of the term than I did going into it, and this is a good progress. 

However, when learning is as intense as it is in the Swedish system - each module runs for only five weeks, so the preparation time is mercilessly short - there comes a point when this learning starts to feel forced, like finishing a meal out of ingrained courtesy even though you are on the verge of sending it all back again. At this point, reading becomes a chore, and this in turn creates a strange emptiness to someone whose favourite pastime is reading. Since the second half of December, I have only finished reading one single book, and while I have started reading others, I have been unable to finish them, mostly because I have had very little mental energy left for these books, but also because these books are medieval texts and therefore pertain to my professional life. In this way, reading these texts bears some resemblance to the kind of chore work that I have been doing for large parts of the term. It is a mood that I have struggled to get out of. Fortunately, it seems that the tide is slowly turning. 

This week, as a greater part of the items on my physical to-do-list have been crossed off and I have slowly sunk into a state of what is either relaxation or carelessness, I have found a way to resume learning but without a specific aim for the learning in question. Before my return to Norway, I had ordered a booklet from the project Ancient European Languages And Writings (AELAW), hosted by the University of Zaragoza. These booklets provide introductions to now-extinct languages that survive in small corpora of inscriptions, and that - at least for the most part - are not yet understood in full. This is a subject that I find fascinating, but which I will never be able to employ in my own research, as this is well beyond my topic, and well beyond the period of my expertise. Moreover, since I am not teaching ancient history again anytime soon, this is not something that I am reading with the aim of incorporating it into a syllabus. I have therefore started learning again.       

Booklet 1 in the Ancient European Languages And Writings (AELAW) series
Published by the University of Zaragoza

This weekend, I'm drawn into the fascinating fragmentary world of the Celtiberian language, one of the several languages used in Iberia in the centuries before the birth of Christ, and one which survives in a range of fascinating sources. The booklet on Celtiberian has opened up a window into a world of tantalising little windows into a past not unknown but not as well known as it could have been, had we only possessed greater knowledge of its languages. It is the kind of reading that stokes the imagination, and that helps to give an even greater depth to the knowledge I have already accumulated about the period in question. It is the kind of learning that does not help my own professional life, but which gives my reading life so much more weight and pleasure, and that allows me to disentangle myself from the various chores and tasks presided over by looming deadlines and concerns about future employment. It is a learning that is aimless because it does not serve an immediate purpose, and it is exactly that characteristic that means that this is a joyful and pleasant learning, which might be aimless but in no way pointless.     

Working with liturgical fragments, part 17 - small beginnings

Today I attended an online workshop on the research on medieval manuscript fragments in the Nordic countries. I myself was merely a listener and not one of the presenters, and it was very inspiring and interesting to be updated on the status quo. It brought my mind back to the manuscript fragments I have been researching during my time in Odense, Denmark, and to which I still turn my attention from time to time. At the library of the University of Southern Denmark (SDUB), new fragments are still being brought to light, and fragments that have been known to the researchers already are receiving renewed attention and have more of their details revealed. As I have mentioned in previous blogposts on the subject - such as here, here, and here - the research on fragments require that the fragments be revisited from time to time as the researcher's experience has been improved. This is true for all research, of course, but perhaps especially so in the case of medieval manuscript fragments that can often be hard to read and that carry many of their secrets in the open, impossible to interpret except by the trained eye.

As we gain experience and become more observant of the smaller details, more adept at reading script nearly obliterated by time and wear, we also become able to gather information from sources we previously thought were completely mute. I was reminded of one such fragment during the workshop, namely a small, badly worn, scrappy liturgical manuscript used as the binding of a seventeenth-century book. I first learned of the book while I was employed at the University of Southern Denmark back in 2017-18, and as there were then several other fragments whose information was less inaccessible, I did not give this fragment its due attention. 

A few months ago, however, my friend and colleague, Jakob Povl Holck, research librarian at SDUB, sent me some pictures of the tattered volume and told me about the information he had actually managed to glean. While we previously were certain of one thing only - that the fragment had belonged to a liturgical manuscript - Jakob had managed to extract quite a few details. These details are now in the processes of being reviewed, and I choose to be very secretive about the results. But what I can say, and what I am very happy to say, is that from a very small and inauspicious beginning, this fragile piece of parchment has proved to be a much more interesting remnant than previously thought. 

Fyens Stiftsbibliotek m04 An43.2 p
Kept by Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek
Photo courtesy of Jakob Povl Holck