A Merry Romp

A quick note about my most recent adventure: Today I went to a lecture about Lucretius, on recommendation of my primary tutor. It was a smaller room than the Logic lecture, and a smaller crowd. But who was there really didn't matter. The lecturer, a woman, began talking (it appeared she was reading a paper she had written) very quickly, mixing Latin, Greek, and British together in an overwhelming rush of words, while the rest of us in the room tried to follow a hand-out she had given us. She said twice, during the course of the hour, that she would now take us on a "merry romp" through some dense, classical subject, and that's pretty much how the whole hour felt--a merry romp through the first 150 lines of De Rerum Natura (which she calls "the DRN") and some assorted criticism of those lines.

For my primary tutorial, I have been assigned four readings that do much the same thing (ie, gloss the criticism). So I'm not reading the DRN, but I'm reading about it. It's having much the same effect as keeping a dog on a leash within sight and noseshot of his dinner. But I'm practicing patience, and I think my first paper will be about (and maybe even titled) preparing to read Lucretius.

But now I'm off to Shakespeare's Denmark.