Of course, why would any Perseus rush to release her?

The metaphor is wrong. Juliet is not Andromeda imprisoned by the rock — nor by any external malefactor agent. She is not imprisoned by circumstance at all but — by her own inertia. The author calls it fear, but though the jailer sometimes does take on the color of fear, he is in fact something far more prosaic and ubiquitous: he is indolence.

It would not do for any Perseus merely to cut the bonds that bind and thus set the heroine free because she would not thereby be made free from her own ineptitude. No flourish of Perseus sword could suddenly make her creative, enterprising, and fearless. She would stand there, on that rock, rubbing her wrists and waiting to be told what next. And, he offering no plan and no commitment, she would complain and hold it against him that, having liberated her from that particular circumstance (bad marriage, a child she does not love), he has not gone on to give more: housing, income, purpose in life, sexual excitement.

You see, women lean on men for the same reason why men lean on women: they are too unimaginative, too lazy, and too fearful to conceptualize even, let alone pursue contentment on their own. Not finding it on their own, they find it — never, and excuse themselves by blaming the circumstance and some significant other as the insurmountable obstacle which made everything impossible.

Knowing this, why would any Perseus take on such a challenge? Belonging to that rare species of heros himself — those who do not feel imprisoned by their circumstance, those who can cut the bonds — why would he devote his life to the never-ending task of looking after Andromeda? He would obviously prefer to save his liberty-bestowing efforts on liberating another heros — or heroine — who could then take up the task of living into her own hands.

The truth is, Juliet’s circumstances were not imprisoning at all.

I am not really sure why I have avoided D. H. Lawrence all my life: somehow I managed to associate him with images of dreary working class neighborhoods of unplastered brick in fog and drizzle. But his prose is poetic and this story, at least, is lyrical and imbued with great and sensitive beauty. The subject is a woman recovering from something — perhaps post partum depression — by sunbathing, just as I have recovered from mine. The notion of conscious life being somehow separate and somehow altogether besides the heat of the sun coursing through the dark passages of our body struck me as strangely apt; as did the description of the early morning sun shaking itself off from the wetness of the night. And the observation how recovery from depression, perceived as a kind of warming, awakes sexual desire. As perhaps sunbathing itself does. (God knows, I have been at the receiving end of this: does this explain crowded summertime beaches?)

David Herbert was a very sexual man — the story illustrates this, and as does his fiery relationship with his wife. I am guessing he was one of those who think, as I did until recently, that sex and our sexual nature is the most central, the most fundamental element of our being; and that once we lose it, there is no more point to life. But he was empathically — rather than voyeuristically — interested in female sexuality, and he wrote about it both openly and beautifully. Here he portrays the slow gradual rise of desire of a convalescent, under Sicilian sun. It’s very touching. It made me get up and go out into the sun.

And then there is the story’s denuement: the heroine belongs to that common class of people who simply cannot take initiative and responsibility. The women who need a man to achieve anything, to dare it, even; the men who spend their lives doing as told, first by their mothers, then their wives.

The story features a couple like this. She will bear him another child because that is the only sex she dares to have, even though it is pale and worm-like; and he will agree to support her life abroad and even take off his immaculate clothing and sunbathe, if she orders him to. They are both bound to the vast wheel of circumstance, as so many others.

Feeling her look at him, he flung off his old straw hat, showing his round, close-cropped  brown head, and reached out with a large brown-red hand for the great loaf, from which he  broke a piece and started chewing with bulging cheek. He knew she was looking at him. And she had such power over him, the hot inarticulate animal, with such a hot, massive  blood-stream down his great veins! He was hot through with countless suns, and mindless  as noon. And shy with a violent, farouche shyness, that would wait for her with consuming  wanting, but would never, never move towards her. 

With him, it would be like bathing in another kind of sunshine, heavy and big and  perspiring: and afterwards one would forget. Personally, he would not exist. It would be just  a bath of warm, powerful life — then separating and forgetting. Then again, the procreative  bath, like sun. 

But would that not be good! She was so tired of personal contacts, and having to talk  with the man afterwards. With that healthy creature, one would just go satisfied away,  afterwards. As she sat there, she felt the life streaming from him to her, and her to him. She  knew by his movements he felt her even more than she felt him. It was almost a definite  pain of consciousness in the body of each of them, and each sat as if distracted, watched by  a keen-eyed spouse, possessor. 

And Juliet thought: Why shouldn’t I go to him! Why shouldn’t I bear his child? It would  be like bearing a child to the unconscious sun and the unconscious earth, a child like a fruit.  — And the flower of her womb radiated. It did not care about sentiment or possession. It  wanted man-dew only, utterly improvident. But her heart was clouded with fear. She dare  not! She dare not! If only the man would find some way! But he would not. He would only  hover and wait, hover in endless desire, waiting for her to cross the gully. And she dare not,  she dare not. And he would hang round. 

“You are not afraid of people seeing you when you take your sun-baths?” said her  husband, turning round and looking across at the peasants. The saturnine wife over the  gully, turned also to stare at the Villa. It was a kind of battle. 

“No! One needn’t be seen. Will you do it too? Will you take the sun-baths?” said Juliet to  him. 

“Why — er — yes! I think I should like to, while I am here.” 

There was a gleam in his eyes, a desperate kind of courage of desire to taste this new  fruit, this woman with rosy, sun-ripening breasts tilting within her wrapper. And she thought  of him with his blanched, etiolated little city figure, walking in the sun in the desperation of  a husband’s rights. And her mind swooned again. The strange, branded little fellow, the  good citizen, branded like a criminal in the naked eye of the sun. How he would hate  exposing himself! 

And the flower of her womb went dizzy, dizzy. She knew she would take him. She knew  she would bear his child. She knew it was for him, the branded little city man, that her  womb was open radiating like a lotus, like the purple spread of a daisy anemone, dark at the  core. She knew she would not go across to the peasant; she had not enough courage, she  was not free enough. And she knew the peasant would never come for her, he had the  dogged passivity of the earth, and would wait, wait, only putting himself in her sight, again  and again, lingering across her vision, with the persistency of animal yearning. 

She had seen the flushed blood in the peasant’s burnt face, and felt the jetting, sudden  blue heat pouring over her from his kindled eyes, and the rousing of his big penis against  his body — for her, surging for her. Yet she would never come to him — she daren’t, she  daren’t, so much was against her. And the little etiolated body of her husband, city-branded,  would possess her, and his little, frantic penis would beget another child in her. She could  not help it. She was bound to the vast, fixed wheel of circumstance, and there was no  Perseus in the universe to cut the bonds. 

D. H. Lawrence, Sun

If forced to review Luque’s book, Borges in Sicily, I would find it difficult to be kind. After the excitement of the ambitious preamble (“a compass for getting irretrievably lost”), and the flashy paragraph describing the symptoms of Borgiomania, one of the first of the book, it goes, alas, pretty limp pretty quickly. Sicily’s sites are found unexciting, food does not merit mention. Reflections on places and literature, such as they are, manage to come across both stilted and shallow. The itinerary is the usual preposterous speed-top-ten-checkmarking in the stupidest (hottest) part of the year, in a hot fiat Punto christened (get this) “Eureka”. (OK?) To make this worse, as is due in a literary journal, a pedantic note is taken of every little literary joke someone manages to crack. E.g. “I wonder, can you bathe in the same lover twice?”, this regarding some mythologically-references body of water; and such like. All equally dreadful.

Finally, of Borges there is nothing. It gradually dawns upon the reader that the point of the trip was… to identify and stand (or sit) in those places where Borges was photographed in 1984. Is this really deserving of a 200-page report?

This, plus to keep incessantly quoting from books and poems. I do understand that literary types don’t really live in the world as we know it. They live in a world of words: theirs is a text-based existence, like the first PCs, which would be fine if the texts had more resonance.

It is a sad book, in the final analysis: spare a thought for Luque’s girlfriend. (He himself is OK — he is blessedly easily satisfied with literary quotations).

Really, neither Luque nor his text deserve these three paragraphs.

Yet, I ripped into this book for a good reason. The reason is that for all of its thorough-going inanity, it gave me pleasure. Why? Why! It’s the production! This book is a delicious object! It is in odd and very elegant format: twice as long as wide, and just narrow enough to fit my hand well; it has a delicious vermilion cloth cover, soft to hold yet raw on the fingertips; a matching red bookmark tassel; pretty font and an off-white, slightly yellowish thick paper. It smells delicious. It reminds you of Qing-Dynasty objects d’art.

None of this was enough to compel me to persist beyond page 113 (and I had begun skipping by page 30). Yet, the two hours I spent handling this beautiful object while sitting in the dying warmth of autumnal afternoon were two truly happy hours. I should make a point of buying only hard covers henceforth: it’s not that all hardcovers are as nice as this, but no soft-cover can ever give so much pleasure.

In a way, this experience was another lesson in the importance of aesthetics: and a lot like that other one: listening to Joao Pires play Mozart’s Jeunnehomme concerto, after making love to a beautiful woman, with sun-drenched Mar de Palha looming outside a panoramic window. Pires’ rendition of the concerto, I found on a later occasion, must surely be the most wooden I have ever heard; but after the love making and in front of that view, it made my heart stop.

This often happens with Borges. First you give in to the fascination and the sounds, that song of Hamelin his words posses, where even the most common ones acquire a new meaning in his hands, an unknown texture. Then you aspire to understand, you test out various keys and it is likely that some doors will open. At this point you truly start to enjoy yourself. There are writers who overwhelm the reader; as if they were precious objects only displayed behind reinforced glass. Borges, on the other hand, makes you believe that he is an attainable luxury — one you can touch and even try on. Little by little you discover that his universe, like all literature, is an infinite game of clues that lead to other clues, of readings that refer to other readings, which invariably refer to life. Each one of his texts, it has been said ad nauseum — though it is no less true for that — seems to contain the promise of all the texts in the world. As you make progress with this system of Chinese boxes and secret passages, bit by bit you come to terms with the true dimensions of your task, your cruel limitations, your smallness. And yet Borges has the kindness not to humiliate you. Time and time again, he makes you believe you can take a step forward, that the grail of knowledge is within reach, much closer than you realize. You move on from reading his books to investigating the books others have written about him, the interviews, the collections of stories. Before you know it, you have become a devotee of the Argentinian, someone who compulsively acquires everything with his stamp on it.

Alejandro Luque, Borges in Sicily: Journey with the Blind Guide

Claude B. Erb and Campbell R. Harvey, The Golden Constant

This work of mine, the kind of work which takes no  arms to do, 
Is least noble of all. It’s peopled by Wizards, the  Forlorn, 
The Awkward, the Blinkers, the Spoon-Fingered,  Agnostic Lispers, 
Stutterers of Prayer, the Flatulent, the Closet Weepers, 
The Charlatans. 
I am one of those. 
In January, the month the owls Nest in,
I am a witness & a small thing altogether. 
The Kingdom Of Ingratitude. 
Kingdom of Lies. 
Kingdom of How Dare I.   

—LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO, Domestic Mysticism

Egyptology does not pay.

It’s very sad that so many incredibly bright  scholars holding advanced degrees in esoteric  fields are virtually unemployed in their areas of  expertise. One of the sharpest Egyptologists I have  ever met now teaches foreign languages at a public  junior high school, out of necessity. (But he does a  splendid job of it!) Another is quite prominent but  steadily unemployed, apart from taking on a variety  of little jobs throughout the year to support his  archaeological work. In graduate school I met a very  competent but frustrated scholar of ancient  languages who finally had had enough, sold his  books, and was retrained as a machinist, making  specialized nuts and bolts. And then there are the  academic nomads, who might teach one course at  three different colleges in a single day for miserable  wages with a lot of driving in between. I know—I’ve  done it. 

Yet, it goes on.

What has always impressed me about archaeology and Egyptology is the large number of folks outside  the vocation who are actively involved, some in an  almost obsessive manner. I’ve met quite a few for  whom ancient Egypt is a deep infatuation and has  become their principal pastime. Some of them are  as informed, if not more so, than the professionals,  and others have a very admirable armchair  knowledge paired with irrepressible enthusiasm. 

Enthusiasm is the key-word:

Before a formal publication is available, the information is often presented at conferences where the various  players, contenders, aspirants, and armchair enthusiasts gather to consume the latest  revelations. In North America the annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt is the  primary such assembly attracting several hundred performers and spectators attending three days of the presentations, or “papers,” are really the core of such gatherings, with a constant stream  being presented about every twenty minutes, organized by theme and held concurrently in adjacent lecture rooms. The result is a beehive of activity, with a transient audience rushing to catch the paper of choice, carefully selected from program booklets that they’ve marked off like a racing form.  Decisions need to be made: Should I catch the  latest discovery at El-Hibeh or the new perspectives  on the god Osiris? 

Donald P. Ryan, Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist

Before they became movie stars, and even earlier, before they became war heroes, T. E. Lawrence and his spy-master, David Hogarth, were for a time Egyptian archeologists. In those days, this involved living in tombs, like latter-day Saint Anthonys:

[My evenings were spent] in a huge grotto with storied walls, because the lower Nile Valley is a thoroughfare of furious winds all winter long, and tent life, a constant misery in Egypt, would have been most miserable on the face of the Siut bluff, which stands out into the wind’s track, and is buffetedby all their storms. Not that our wide-mouthed  grotto, however, proved much better than a tent.  The north wind struck its farther wall, and was  sucked around the other two in an unceasing,  unsparing draught which dropped dust by the  way on everything we ate or drank or kept.  Warmth after the day’s toil we never felt  December to February, even when sitting closest to the fire which we kindled nightly with  unpainted slats of ancient coffins on a hearth of  Old Empire bricks. The dead wood, seasoned by four thousand years of drought, threw off an  ancient and corpse-like smell, which left its faint savour on the toast which we scorched at the embers; and a clear smokeless light fell fitfully on serried coffins, each hiding a gaunt tenant  swathed and bound, to whose quiet presence we  grew so little sensitive that we ranged our stores  and bottles, our pans and our spare garments on his convenient lid.

The work offered other challenges:

Crawling on all fours in the dark, one often found the passage barred by a heap of dim swaddled mummies turned out of their coffins by some earlier snatcher of bodies; and over these one had to go, feeling their breast-bones crack under one’s knees and their swathed  heads shift horribly this way or that under one’s hands. And having found nothing to loot in a thrice plundered charnel-house, one crawled  back by the same grisly path to the sunlight, choked with mummy dust and redolent of more  rotten grave-clothes than the balms of Arabia could sweeten. 

Donald P. Ryan, Beneath the Sands of Egypt: Adventures of an Unconventional Archaeologist