Some Words

I spent time trying to come up with a better title, honest.

After I read The Abyss by Margguerite Yourcenar, I went out and bought Memoirs of Hadrian immediately.

I started reading it a little while ago, and while they are very different books, there is one link between the two which struck me. Yourcenar seems to have been facinated by the way we convert food into energy and flesh. These two characters each have moments when they contemplate the way the body converts food. They come from very different eras of society and learning. Hadrian, by luck of time and fate, is in a much better position than Zeno, though both will die at around the same age. It may be nothing, but because I am reading the books about a month apart I can’t help but conflate the two passages. These two men are close to death, but while one wonders at the the magic of food being converted into human flesh, the other decides that eating is not worth it, as he will not have a chance to convert that food. It is the success of Hadrian’s life that seems to afford him this luxury. Zeno, while he has survived, has not been given the luxury of success that Hadrian has. In many ways, they are the same man. In one time the world was able to accept him, in another it was not. I may come back to that, but I’m at work right now, and am thus on someone else’s dime.

In other news:

Yesterday there was a great post at The Valve about Grendel’s glove.

I was looking at t-shirts over at Threadless only to see that Matt from Anathallo was in one of the pictures from the latest batch of shirts. It’s the Mob Band t-shirt, and Matt is one of the few members of Anathallo who doesn’t play a horn. Just a weird little moment.