Universe! Enough with the paleography already!

Today I sort of hit a wall. I know, it's only been three days--and when I hit said wall, it had only been two and a half. But sitting quietly in the manuscript room fussing over fourteenth-century Latin abbreviations for two and a half days is not exactly relaxing, trace or no trance.

Essentially, I was tired: I slept badly last night, having been kept awake until almost 2 am by the irrelevant ranting I was doing in my head. Really--I was having long mental arguments over trivial things with people I'm unlikely to even speak to in the next three months, anticipating all kinds of disasters in the upcoming semester, worrying about money when I have no business doing so (chiefly regretting committing to an overseas conference of which the College will only be able to pay half, which means that my savings account will be depleted by about 8%--horrors! Really. Just tell me to shut up), etc. Evidently I have some kind of stress or something. Or perhaps my body is overcompensating for the jetlag? The point is, I was tired.

I also kind of lost direction by mid-day. I'd answered my immediate questions and was casting about for another one; in practice, this meant staring off into space a lot and then idly flipping through a few pages.

At 3:00 or so, I decided to take off. This isn't helpful, I thought. I vowed that I would regroup tomorrow and do something productive.

So, having dropped off my laptop etc., I went to the used bookstore to pick up a novel, since I'm almost done with my fun reading. I settled on Zola's Le Reve, because I had enjoyed Germinal (which I read in English) and it was relatively short.

Off I went, to wander, drink a beer, etc. I was doing quite well with the French and enjoying the story, which--so far--is about a young girl named Angelique who is taken in by a couple, Hubert and Hubertine Hubert (or so I enjoy calling them, to myself, because the characters are individually called Hubert and Hubertine and collectively called les Hubert).

One day, twelve-year-old Angelique stumbles upon--seriously--a 1549 edition of a French translation of Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea. Seriously.

She likes the pictures, at first. And then she confronts the text. I translate, loosely:

The two dense columns of text, whose ink had remained very black upon the yellowed paper, frightened her, because of the barbaric appearance of the Gothic characters. But she got used to it, decoded its characters, understood the abbreviations and the contractions, figured out how to decipher the ancient words; and in the end she read fluently, enchanted as though she had penetrated into a mystery, triumphing over the conquest of each new difficulty.

And then, I kid you not, Zola blathers on for twenty pages about the lives of the saints.

The revisiting of Juliana and Vincent and Stephen and Christina etc etc I can take. But a twelve-year-old reading a sixteenth-century Gothic hand? Please. And, universe, I know that I'm not very good at this--stop rubbing it in.

A genius confined to an office chair must either die or go mad.*

Some of what I love:

• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
  
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
  
• Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (love love love)
• Flaubert, Sentimental Education
• Maugham, Of Human Bondage
• Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
• Isak Dinesen
• A.S. Byatt
• Nabokov
• Proust
  
• Rilke

and

• My husband's hazelnut ice cream, just served in a small brown dish.**
  

You look at my reading list and think that I went into the wrong field.

And yet I'm in the right place. Hi-ho, European Lit Seminar, Spring 2010! Hurrah for Brit Lit/European Generalist jobs! I never thought I'd like you, but I do. (And why am I thinking about next semester's courses now? What possessed me to order my books this afternoon? Lest you think I'm on the ball: I'm not, otherwise.)

These novels, they make me weep. I am in love with them. Deeply. Reading them is like reading back into my younger self, my 20-year-old wild poet self, my self of desires and resistance, my buzz-cut braless barefoot savage self--o God, how am I going to teach these books [some of them; not all: Proust and Mann are too long; Byatt, Maugham, and Eliot too English; I'd have them read Nabokov's Ada but it's too too] if my students fail to love them as deeply as I do?

*The quote's from Lermontov. The sentiment is universal.

**Also married to the right man. Yum.

Memeage

I should be prepping, but I vastly prefer checking off lists that make me look good. Thus, I bring you the BBC Book Meme, as seen at Dr. Crazy's.

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible – Parts, of course, but admittedly little
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – Sufficient but not complete
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks I haven't heard of this one, actually
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot – X+++!
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - seen the movie, though!
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy – abridged! accidentally—I really thought it was complete....
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - X
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X
34 Emma - Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (Isn't this part of the Chronicles of Narnia?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere - X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X+ (I read the first 3 volumes every couple of years—just got through them again this fall, in fact)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - * (I even have it on loan)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X+
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - X+
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – X (maybe +)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X (all but the last 60 pages...twice)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - X
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt X+++ (one of my very favorites)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (not gonna happen)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – X (wouldn't this be included in the Complete Shakespeare? I'm confused by this list)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - * (I started it once, in French, but didn't get very far)

Total: 56 read (if I count Ulysses but not the complete Shakespeare, the Bible, or the accidentally abridged War and Peace. I think that's fair). Two that I want/plan to read.

This is kind of a weird list, methinks, but perhaps I'm just out of touch.

Oh, Marcel

I've been reading In Search of Lost Time for eight or nine years, and I'm now within shouting distance of the end--about a third of the way through Time Regained. (I'm reading it in English, I admit. Although I did read most of Du Cote de chez Swann and Albertine disparue for a seminar in grad school. Not that that matters; I'm just boasting over my admittedly very modest accomplishment.) Anyway, when I try to summarize the book--insofar as it can be summarized, of course of course--I find myself talking a lot about Marcel/Proust's seeming obsession with homosexuality. I mean really. Basically all of the last 1200 or so pages (of my 2400-page edition) is about whether a) Albertine is sleeping with other women; b) if so, who might those other women be (everyone, in his imagination); c) how one can tell whether a woman is a lesbian (basically he thinks they all are); d) how Paris is overrun with lesbians engaging in an orgy of secret rendezvous; e) the gestures, tones, actions, etc etc common to homosexual men; and f) how it should have been obvious all along that Saint-Loup was "of that inclination" because of a certain minute resemblance to the Baron de Charlus.

It's weird.

(I was describing this to the Minister the other day and he said, "So, basically, could you say that this is the first major treatise on gaydar?")

Now I remark upon this because it seems to me that anytime anyone talks about Proust, they talk about the madelaine incident, the art criticism, the reflections on beauty and aesthetics and memory and all that other lovely abstract stuff. They don't talk about the scene where Marcel stumbles upon the Baron de Charlus chained to a bed in a hotel room where one Maurice is flogging him with a nail-studded cat-o-nine-tails. I mean, I'm sure that some people talk about these scenes--and I know that there are critical works out there on homosexuality in Proust, of course there are--but really, when I came upon that scene I wondered how anyone could be distracted by the musings on the Combray cathedral when the entire second half of the novel is just peppered with such salacious (and weirdly paranoid) detail.

So why doesn't this ever come up when people are casually referencing Proust?

Is it because--as I suspect--most of those who are making such casual references haven't read very much of the novel?

It's like this dream I had when I was a teenager: There was a famous 17th-century thinker who'd written an encyclopedic work spanning many volumes, and everyone loved it and spoke highly of it although it was supposed to be immensely difficult. Well, one day I (in my dream, still, of course) got a hold of a copy of this work and started leafing through it. Imagine my surprise when I found nothing but blank page after blank page until I got to the end, when there was a single line in the middle of a page, saying:

"I have had carnal relations with your sheep."

I awoke giggling. I now believe that dream to have been a foreshadowing of my encounter with Proust.

[CAVEAT: I am not, of course, wholly serious in this post, and I am also very much not a Proust scholar. As I say, I know that there's some scholarship (at least) on sexuality in Proust, and for all I know there's a cubic ton of it, and everyone in Proustian circles talks about nothing but his weird obsession with other people's sex lives. All I'm saying is that, when the non-Proustian come across the casual reference to Proust and the supposedly obvious themes of his work, you never see anything about, for example, his conviction that Paris is nothing but a clandestine network of promiscuous lesbians.]

Book Meme

Both Medieval Woman and Belle tagged me for the meme in which one lists five of the best books that one read in 2007. Luckily, 2007 was a year in which I reread several favorite novels, and I'm happy to promote them. So (in no particular order), here goes.

1. The Day on Fire, by James Ramsey Ullman. I know that I've mentioned this book at least once on this blog, but it's truly great, and I reread it with pleasure last winter. A fictionalized biography of Arthur Rimbaud, Ullman's novel is an engrossing account of the poet's wanderings (mostly on foot) through France, Italy, and North Africa; his time in Java; and his relationship with Verlaine. Of course, it's fiction, and Ullman fills in the blanks in creative ways, but it's really well written and just an absorbing book. Out of print, unfortunately, but readily available online.

2. Ada, or Ardor, by Nabokov. I reread this when I was in Europe last spring. I originally read it in about 1997, when I was a fresh young thing just finishing college, and I loved it--but I don't honestly think that I understood it all. Didn't think that I understood it, in fact. I confess that I picked it up again with a hint of trepidation: I barely remembered the novel, and I was afraid that it was going to be a lot of Nabokovian smoke and mirrors (although I've yet to meet the VN novel I didn't at least like). But no, it was terrific, and I loved it, and I highly recommend it. All kinds of weird musings on time and space, and it takes a really long time to figure out what world the novel is even set in, if that makes sense. And it's just incredibly satisfying to grasp it all, in the end.

3. Pride and Prejudice. I read this over the last week or two because I'm going to be teaching it next semester, and you know, I just think that Jane Austen is fun. I didn't used to like her much, but as I grow older I find myself appreciating her more and more.

4. The Time-Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. Two people gave me this book within the space of a couple of months. For a time-travel book, it's surprisingly satisfying. One thing that I particularly liked about it was the way in which the horror of time travel is evoked. Time travel always seems like such a neat idea--but I suspect that if spontaneous chronological displacement actually happened, it would be the way it's portrayed in this novel: suddenly finding yourself naked and afraid in an unknown place. Not too good.

5. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I first read McCarthy about 11 years ago, and I steered clear thereafter: Child of God freaked me out but good. Then, this fall, the student group of which I'm a sponsor decided to read the novel as a sort of book-club thing, so I read it, and it's pretty damn gripping. What I found most interesting about it was the way it made me think about the importance of human community and how, in the total absence of community, life itself would seem pretty close to meaningless. Definitely drives home the whole social-animal part of our makeup. Plus he's just a fantastic writer. I don't want to go see that new movie, though.

I'm not going to tag anyone in particular because I don't know whom to tag. But I'm interested in reading recommendations from everyone out there who reads this blog, so consider this a Blanket Tagging.

(By the way, the phone interview went fine. I think. As far as I could tell. Definitely better than the Interview of Doom, and I have a pretty good feeling about it. Of course, I've had pretty good feelings about interviews in the past, so I'm not putting too much stake in my subjective experience of the affair--but hey, at least I don't think I bombed.)

Grading

That's right, I'm grading. And you know what else? This is the second batch of papers I've graded this semester. I sure do get things going early, no?

It's good, though, to get an early gauge on how I'm pitching my lectures/discussions, especially since this is a whole new batch of students and I don't quite know what to expect. So far, it seems that I'm going too fast for some and too slow for others--in other words, doing about as well as I can reasonably do.

But for some reason (crazy, I know, to be fantasizing about doing other things while grading) what I really want to do these days is go back and reread Malory's Morte. Odd, I know, since it's not the most page-turning of novels or whatever. Perhaps I'm nostalgic for my first reading of it? Although the time in my life when I read it was not an especially happy time, so I'm not sure that that explains it. I do like some bits an awful lot, but the persistence of this craving is a little puzzling. And since I can't conceivably fit it into any current or upcoming research projects, and I have plenty of other work on my plate, it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to indulge.

Anyone else have obscure reading urges? Is this a common feeling--the desire to read a very specific book, even one that's not necessarily a favorite?

Things Seem to be Proceeding Apace

Not a lot to report this week. I've been visiting the boyfriend down in the Metropole, so I haven't been able to make any headway on moving stuff--that's probably for the best. It's been good to take some time off from staring at my books and thinking, "Do I really need you? or you? How would I feel without The Mill on the Floss? What if I need to recollect some essential fact about Maggie Tulliver? What will its absence do to Middlemarch, which will then be the lone Eliot on the shelf (Silas Marner having already received the axe)? Oh god, oh god, I don't know if I can give it up!"

For the record, I plan to keep The Mill on the Floss.

The car-purchasing frenzy has also sort of died down. I may still buy my friend's car, but I haven't test-driven it yet, and I'm leaving tomorrow, so that'll have to wait for my next visit. In the meantime, I'm going to look into the possibility of renting a car for an occasional weekend (thanks to Hilaire and Sisyphus for that suggestion!). Once I Crunch the Numbers, I'll have a better sense of whether paying for a car + insurance will really be a good idea.

So what I've been doing, for the last few days at least, is reading some of the stuff on the very end of my survey syllabus. I recently bumped into a friendly acquaintance on campus who'd just finished teaching her first-ever course, and she said that in the future she planned to prepare her last classes of the semester well in advance--ideally before the semester even begins. Because by the end of the semester she found herself just too worn out to thoroughly prep her lectures. Now, I'm not going to go that far; it might turn out to be a waste of time, after all, because presumably the concerns etc. that I'll want to highlight in December will be shaped by what we've done in September through November. But the tail-end of the survey course--which is one of your typical lit surveys, running up to about 1800--is the end that I know least well, and I'd never actually read one of the longer texts that I want to assign. So it seemed highly sensible to take a look at them.

I must say that I'm enjoying this. It reminds me of reading for my comprehensive exams early in grad school, a process that I also much enjoyed. I came across that poem of, um, Cowper's, I think, that's quoted all over To the Lighthouse--you know, "We perished, each alone"--and it was just such a pleasure to finally see what it was that Mr. Ramsay was always mumbling to himself. [It is Cowper; I just checked.] One of the things that I really wanted to get out of grad school was breadth of knowledge, as well as depth; while the dissertation is excellent for promoting depth, breadth sort of gets lost in the shuffle, especially once coursework is over. And, in my grad program at least, I fear that increasing budget cuts will limit the opportunities for reading widely outside of one's stated field even more. Ideally, perhaps, one should see undergrad as the time for reading widely, and grad school as the time to focus; but this isn't terribly practical, I don't think, as I was still developing the critical reading skills that I needed to understand and appreciate a lot of this literature when I was an undergrad. Or rather, I would have understood and appreciated them differently at that time: not inadequately, necessarily, but differently, and in a way that possibly wouldn't have been useful to me in grad school or beyond.

But perhaps the same could be said of my reading now. That is, my understanding of the literature I read for my exams back in '02 or whenever it was might not be terribly useful to me now, and I really ought to go and reread Milton and Spenser and so forth in order to "get them" in a way that's appropriate to my current interests and--for lack of a better term--scholarly "level." And should read them again in another 5 years or so. It's kind of like how, at the end of college, I thought that I'd be better off if I could start it all over: I'd have taken a better range of classes and ultimately gotten more out of my education. But then I realized that, if I could have done so, at the end of Round 2 I very likely would have had the exact same feeling.

Luckily for me, however, I'll have to read bits of both Milton and Spenser for this very survey class. Maybe that's one good thing about teaching: returning to the same texts again and again can, in a funny way, keep you fresh.

I guess I'm thinking about this in part because I spent some time this spring re-reading favorite books from about 10 years ago, to see whether they were still good (and because I'd pretty much forgotten a lot of what happened in them). So I read Ullman's The Day on Fire, Nabokov's Ada, and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. All three were, indeed, excellent, and it was a real pleasure to discover them anew.

****************
On a totally unrelated note:

Although I haven't formally been tagged for Squadratomagico's new meme, I do have one wonderment: Why on earth do bars equate "loud" with "fun"? We were out somewhere on Friday (for a free happy hour courtesy of boyfriend's workplace) where we had to speak so loudly to be heard over the music that my throat is still rough and I'm still a little hoarse two days later. Decidedly not fun, I assert.

Summer Reading

Ah, summer. I feel like it's almost over already...which it isn't...but there's so much to do and so little that I've DONE....

For the last few days, I've been reading like crazy (by which I mean, about 3 hours a day--but sometimes 4! I swear!) for this one class I have to teach in the fall. Now I'm a medievalist, as you know, and I've been hired pretty much as a generalist (I'm the new "British Literature" person at VerySLAC). But this one course doesn't even fit into BritLit. Now I figure I can describe it, because it's a pretty common course--it covers things like, oh, Virgil and Homer and Dante. Dante, yes, he's medieval (if not British). But Homer? Virgil? Oh, and Ovid? Sophocles? Those guys? Not so much.

And this is SO not my field. I had to read The Odyssey in the ninth grade, and I've read Oedipus Rex and Antigone at various points in my education, but that's it. So this month I read The Aeneid, and I'm currently working my way through The Iliad.

While I'm finding this material a little on the overwhelming side, I'm actually glad that I'm going to be teaching it. This is the kind of stuff that I have long felt I ought to read and know well, but that I never had the incentive to read and know well. And having to teach something? It kinda forces you to be on at least speaking terms with a text, right? So this is all a very good thing for me.

On the other hand, I can't come up with a syllabus that doesn't have us reading just a ridiculous amount of stuff every week, and that's kind of scary. In the process of reading the first 14 books of The Iliad, however, I've become convinced that certain sections of the text can be, er, skimmed. I'm not skimming now, because I need to ascertain what does and does not require one's full attention, but I might use the skimming policy as a means of packing the whole poem into like 2 weeks. (You know, assign books 1-6 but tell them to just "skim" 2 and 5, or whatever.) It's just...well, there's an awful lot of battle scenes, you know? My apologies to any classicists out there, but I find that my mind sort of wanders when confronted with stanza after stanza of "X hurled his spear at Y, son of Z, riveting his bosom through the nipple, and the blood poured out, red Trojan blood to water the battlefield. And M slew H, son of K, tearing neatly through both his nipples, and F saw this, and wept, crying out...." Etc.

(Okay I made that example up, obviously, but have you noticed how many references there are to (male) nipples in this book? At least, in Fagles' translation? It's kind of weird. And yes, that's pretty much all I'm getting out of the battle scenes: Nipples!)

An Unexpected Convergence

Regarding my last post: I just read, unrelatedly, a paper on reading practices in classical antiquity. Specifically, on active reading practices whereby readers wrote critical commentary and questions in the margins of their texts--along (almost) exactly the lines of my erstwhile Abelard critic. Hmm.

I'm actaully really interested in questions of readers' interactions with texts, specifically as they relate to authorial attempts at controlling interpretation in the Middle Ages. I can think of transparent instances of such attempts in some theological literature, but I'm starting to bat around ideas about how it might manifest in secular lit, too. Nothing much to say about it, at this point, except that when my pleasure reading combines with my required reading to highlight exactly the issue I've been half-thinking about, it seems like it's time to stop half-thinking and start weighing the issue in earnest....

Marginalia

For kicks (and because I figure it's time I get around to it), I've been reading the letters of Abelard and Heloise this week. I have a cheap used translation ($0.99 from the campus book store), and the previous owner evidently took issue with Abelard's, um, ego.

"He doesn't address the problems in order!" s/he writes fervently in the margin of page 145. A few pages later: "He thinks he's so perfect now. 'Was' guilty," and, "he cares for her out of duty from previousness [sic] not love. he says he suffered for them both to be forgiven, as if she has gotten a free ride."

Now the commentary is flying thick and fast. Page 150 finds criticism of his style ("He goes on too much about one point"), his self-representation and hypocrisy ("he overdoes stuff! (exaggerated his humility, after condemning that)"), and attitude towards family ("doesn't he love his son, shouldn't having a kid change his view").

By page 154, our intrepid reader has had enough. Time to address Abelard directly:

"Yes, dummy," s/he fumes, "but she still suffers from desire! It's easy to say cuz you can't feel it anymore."

There ought to be some kind of clever joke to be made about monastic reading practices and/or Biblical exegesis, but it's beyond me at the moment. All I can say is, I'm enjoying the vicarious experience of one reader's impassioned lectio--and yes, Abelard is a bit full of himself, sure. But isn't that just a part of his charm?