On the death of a computer

Perhaps the most formulative influence on my character, on my approach to scholarship (such as it is), has been my growing up in a working class, blue collar, background. I do not mean any of the many vices and virtues that that background conjures up but the constant envelopment by manual labour. Summers spent on building sites, winters spent rewriting plugs or refurbishing shopfronts (I adore chainsaws) and so on. Of course, let us be honest, it is only the fact that autumns and springs were spent in classrooms that I can look back on this period of my life with detachment: I am free from RSIs, have none of the obscure but common injuries my schoolfriends suffer,[1] and went into the world of fake work.

You will not really find much, if any, classical parallel for this attitude. Hard, physical, menial, work was the stuff on slaves. Think of Odyssey 11 where the ghost of Achilles deems it better to be the merest living thrall than king amongst the dead. Admittedly, a big (the largest) part of this is the shame of living at the compulsion of another but this is a good proxy for menial work. [2]We misread, severely, the spirit of the protestant yeoman farmer into Hesiod for whom no amount of pride and self-sufficiency in ownership of one’s land can mask that work is a toil. Think of the vocabulary that surrounds any discussion of physical labour in Greek. Indeed, the toil of farming is one to win from the earth the gifts the gods have bid be hidden (kρύψαντες γὰρ ἔχουσι θεοὶ βίον ἀνθρώποισιν).

No surprise then that I can think of no apposite quotation for the joy brought by a good tool. The first – the only – thing that comes to mind is Seneca’s torturous reflections on the humanity of slaves, rather than the inhumanity, which to be honest seems to have a lot more rhetorical weight when it reflects what must have been the communis opinio. (It’s in de beneficiis somewhere near the beginning).

So, anyway guys, my computer died. It was sudden but not entirely unexpected. The once mighty machine had been doing the job since 2016 after all, and whilst I can swap out one more part, try one more repair, it scarcely seems worth the cost now. To what degree can an υπολογιστής be a mentula? I can’t help but think, and compare, with the tools I have inherited from near ancestors: Here are one great-grandfather’s woodworking tools, here are the custom smithy tools of another, here a cavalry sabre, and so on. A burnt-out motherboard seems a poor and pathetic comparandum. But then who knows? They were none of them protestants, perhaps they were closer in attitude to the ancients and see nought but praise in being free from such toil, such ponos.

(I am not joking, by the way, when I point out how much the reformation has fundamentally defined the way we read the Classics).

Pathetic or not, I can’t help but be sad. Humans have the odd habit of imputing anima to the in. It’s why so many are so affected by that scene in Castaway when Tom Hanks draws a face on a ball or something (I’ve never watched it), it’s why idiots pay so much for items touched by celebrities or – hypothetically – find themselves utterly unable to dispose of one of the worst made jumpers ever simply because there is some lizard brained hope it retains the faintest imprint of a lost parent.

It is not just misplaced sentiment. A computer now represents a majority of our working life. Long time readers, well 2 of the three at least, will notice the sheer chunkocity of this post so far without being littered peppered with Greek, the apparent paucity of classical references. It’s because the every day tools we take for granted: the ability to type in Greek, Diogenes, my preferred IDEs etc, all are gone. I don’t even have a banner image, since I do not know how to use the image manipulation software here and, damn it, I refuse to learn.

Gone, too, until I salvage one of the hard-disks are dozens of abortifacient half-finished pieces. I have not been posting much this year, but I have been writing. Writing lies with my mouth that is, when I tell you I have been writing. Truly, there were some pieces but most of them no more than a thousand words or so. The larger ones being book reviews which I shall have to get back to soon, that is at least enjoyzble, the reviewing of books. But twitter over the past few years has felt damp. I think we autodidacts, we hemilykoi ektos ths akadamias, kid ourselves immensely with any pretence to a republic of letters.

Oh, it is exists. It exists in part, but it is a big club and you, yes you, are not a part of it.[3] There are no patronage networks, no invitations to write for publications straight out of undergrad, no invitations to whatever. There was a time, a brief time, when you could write and be read and be written to in turn but the last few years have felt increasingly barren. I have always felt a distinct sense of unbelonging in the Classics, which fools often take to mean a lack of a sense of belonging (please…) and there is freedom in that. I can be as unfashionable as I want in my methods and outlooks, I can take Critoboulos as seriously as you pretend to take Thucydides, I can scupper writing in  favour of endless reading and re-reading (this is the first year I have read Homer through twice, and we’re not half way done). Is this entirely a boon?

This is not a segue into working class classicism, whatever the hell that might be. Nor, indeed, the place for me to mention how commerce and industry has been infinitely more accepting (you add to the bottom line and can execute a proper cross-field kick?) than the so called intelligentsia. I do not even know to what degree working class classicism even exists as a concept. There is, ofc, that Hall and Steadman edited volume but it has all the voyeuristic taint of the JCR. I like Attenborough, but I rather hear from the lions. Etc.

I am not sure, no longer sure, perhaps never was sure, why I continue to write. However seldom that now is. There is a pithy saying, that painters enjoy painting and writers enjoy having written. But I have never really felt that. Even now, despite the sheer cringing shame I feel at how badly my prose style has dropped off (still not enough shame to proof and edit though lol), I do enjoy the process. I enjoy the taste and shape of words rolling around, coating, the insides of one’s mouth and their slow unfurling onto screen and scroll.[4]

Have you read Eco’s Baudolino? It was, I think, the first of his I read as a boy. There is much to appeal to any budding Classicist. It is one hell of a farce. There is a bit near the beginning when our titular character is being taught to read and, if I am recalling correctly, decides to finish his education before the, eh, amorous abbot can teach him how to write. Why write? He asks. If I write, I can only tell you what I know, but if I read, I can read what anyone knows. And then there’s some bit about being screwnicorn. You are welcome.

Yet writing is not simply just recording what one knows. Look, I have never, ever, “done research” for a piece. That is some shudra-tier behaviour. I read profusely, rarely make notes, and try to think about whatever I have read. Writing is the process of recording what one thinks about what one knows. In this sense, I suppose the loss of all those drafts is a blow, but less of a blow than the loss of all that reading material. I no longer have access to JSTOR or academic libraries, have not for years, yet all those carefully categorised downloads and scans are now cast unto dust. Ouch.

So, is that the way forward? Lector tantum? (ignosce mihi, Iuvenali, sed facilius erat subripere versulum tuum quam fustum Herculi). Maybe. I do not mind an audience of one or two who actually understand and appreciate. Joking aside, I do have that in abundance here. But increasingly the dichotomy between a small, understanding, audience and a large uncomprehending one is immaterial. Not in some pseudo-Aesopic sour grapes, but because this often feels like being on a soapbox rather than anything discursive. Those who have not read Plato make jokes about Socrates’ tendency to monologue, his interlocutors reduced to mere interjections, but even so there is something to be envied in the give and take of it all.

There is something to be said in how writing is really re-reading, and that alone is a reason to keep it up. Everyone thinks they have mastery until forced to articulate and explain. And blogs are like more ephemeral versions of the old common place book.But eh. Maybe the death of my little computer is a sign. Whether that be for a proper break, and a refreshment, a move to somewhere near (how is Substack, guys, seriously?) or simply una nox dormienda. I do not know.  It is of course the fact that this question is utterly unimportant to anyone other than myself which lends it such weight.

The death of a computer is a mean and silly thing. Of course, that is why it can be written about. I have never promised weight things, never had the courage to commit them to anything but the unfinished moulds of shoddy thoughts. That’s not what either of us are here. I suppose the question is then, why are we?

Ok but what have you been reading?

Excellent question! Let’s briefly give some suggestions. Thanks for making it to the end.

Latin

Aha! I swore to devour the corpus of Nepos and I swear I really tried. I made it through his Cato, Atticus, and Hannibal before somehow getting swept up into Livy on the Punic Wars.

Greek

The Anthology. Seriously that is more or less it these past few weeks. It is not something I am properly familiar with, but I was struck recently about the sheer IDIOCY of spending so much time with Byzantine versifiers and not getting properly to grips with this.

English

Only what I am contractually being paid for lol. The English canon became effectively sealed before Austen even drew breadth. Honestly what is the point?

Misc

Harry Potter in French (don’t judge, I need to become conversational again).

Bana’s Kadambari (because I am a glutton for punishment, this syntax….).

Various Luwian inscriptions (Payne)

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[1] You will be surprised how many chippies and brickies resort to drugs. Honestly, I myself sometimes am by how many of my schoolhood friends have suffered serious harm from such.

[2] Because I say it is.

[3] Or perhaps oyu are? I don’t know you. Good for you, friend. Well done.

[4] Look at that little number in the corner going up with each strike of the space bar. I like to imagine a tiny Bill Gates stuck in the programme, running around and manually updating each number like a score-keeper at an under 11s hockey match.