Sir That's My Emotional Support Toxic Character From A Book About An Elitist Academic Cult

sir that's my emotional support toxic character from a book about an elitist academic cult

time in the secret history as a key to the text... hard to define in a tumblr post sort of way, but at first you have the fact that the book from beginning to end is a recollection, where the passage of time affects how the narrator tells the tale (with awareness of where it ends), and richard moves from receiving information asynchronously (the murder of the farmer) to synchronously (assisting in bunny's murder himself). you can (if you so desire) count how many days it takes from the funeral to henry's suicide (eleven). henry fights time one last time by surviving with a bullet wound to the head.

but even at the simplest levels, isn't the study of the classics, itself, the romanticization of the past?

what did richard learn in greek class with julian more, that beauty is terror, or that it is worth looking back towards the greeks for guidance on life?

when richard asks camilla to tell him a tale, she takes him to a time before she was an orphan, in a winter, where her father for reasons known only to himself and irrelevant to the story throws snowballs at the wall. neither do we or richard care about mr macaulay throwing snowballs at the wall, we only care that camilla loved him then and loves him now, enough to tell the tale after he's gone at least.

and richard does the same, in his own way, tell the tale of something inexplicable but through the lens of "i loved them", because love exists in the past and trying to apply any sort of questions arising in the present to it is meaningless, love is to the person and the memory, not on if we should look now why the dead man was throwing snowballs at a wall.

to put this into perspective... anacreon not only is untranslated even TODAY, let alone in the 70s-80s, but will probably never be translated. the poems anacreon wrote are not lacking in words to be translated into, the hardship in translating them lays with that they are conceived to be recited to music. they are also, exclusively, love poems.

“does such a thing as the fatal flaw exist outside literature? I think it does. and I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

you want me to make friends in college? the thing that killed bunny corcoran?