Progress on reading is very slow, and this despite me having quite a bit of time on my hands. I worked out some years back that I was inclined to the false belief that it was being busy at work that prevented me doing all the stuff I really wanted to do. The fact that I can so easily do so very little when I genuinely have the time points in other darker directions.
However, I have made some progress in The Magic Mountain. Today I found myself gripped by Hans Castorp's brush with mortality in the Snow chapter, which I found myself reading whilst we were out shopping. It's potent stuff, especially the weird dream sequence he surrenders to when taking shelter by the side of the hut in the snow storm. Must say, I found the Apollonian-Dionysiac symbolism pretty obvious, but that kind of added to the potency. It felt happily incongruous to be reading something this extreme in the crowd.
I'm wondering though whether the momentum I picked up on my reading today will be dissipated on the morrow. More than once I've found myself not really up to continuing the novel and putting it to one side for a day. Similarly I realised today that I haven't read any of the Hughes Collected for around a week. It's as if the intensity of these texts is such that I need to take a breather now and again, to escape them for a while. On the positive side, in some way it seems to keep them fresh because as soon as I resume I wonder what was keeping me away from the enjoyment of reading them.
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