Esperance Me Guide

Writing a dissertation is strenuous, and you have to keep your strength up. Yesterday I had popcorn, a cherry Coke, ice cream, a brat, baked beans, lemonade, and potato chips, all in a six-hour period. A brownie, too -- I forgot about that. Getting your mind off your work is also important. I've somehow managed to watch six movies since last weekend, and all of them were frivolous. I have Kurosawa's Rashomon sitting on my living room table, and I guess I'm going to watch it . . . but really, I'd rather watch Letters to Juliet again.

This is all a counterweight to the reading I've been doing. I hit a rough patch with the scholarly tome on labyrinths I've been carrying around. It's an important book and thoroughly researched, but I realized the other day I was drowning in it. I had started to feel like a schoolgirl in pigtails in the face of the author's authoritative tone and profusion of notes. It finally dawned on me today -- this book has turned into a labyrinth! And the author is my Minotaur!

Before I admitted it was a monster, I just used delay tactics to avoid picking it up. This morning, I did a little reading before and after breakfast. That wasn't so bad. I had finally decided I wasn't obligated to study all the illustrations and read all the notes. But despite this concession, I still found myself in no hurry to pick it up again, even after taking a shower, checking my email, looking up the weather forecast, watching Old Spice commercials on YouTube (I'm serious), and paying bills.

After a bit of slow and labored reading, I found a reference in the book to a Bach composition called "Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth" (I didn't know there was such a thing as musical labyrinths, but indeed there is). This composition is supposed to make you think of a labyrinth because of its unexpected chords, but I found it on YouTube, and it just sounded like Bach to me. I did discover by sniffing around that not everybody agrees with my author that this piece is Bach's -- a-ha! A chink in the armor! It came as a relief to find that this expert could be wrong about something . . . though I was disappointed that I couldn't hear the labyrinth in the music.

I decided to clear my head, so I went for a walk. Being on my own two feet seemed to get me oriented, and I got home 40 minutes later feeling better. I wrestled the book into the car and headed for Starbucks. In looking at the 50 pages remaining, I realized I could finish it today if I pushed, since a lot of it is illustrations. I sat by the window and concentrated; I'm sure my expression was terrifying. I read steadily, checking notes here and there, and an hour and a half later, I was finished, despite a headache.

I'm grateful to this author for providing much-needed clarity on the history of the labyrinth; I also appreciate the fact that he's clear on the difference between a labyrinth and a maze, a distinction that's important in my thesis but often ignored by others. All the same, it's nice to be on the other side of this particular labyrinth.

While fixing dinner tonight, I remembered to turn over the page on my calendar, something I always like doing because I look forward to seeing the next month's picture and philosophical quote. The theme of the calendar is The Path: Finding Your Way on Life's Journey. The picture for June shows an empty boardwalk, a study in shadow and light extending into the distance over a marsh or inlet; what appears to be the sea is a blue ribbon in the distance. The caption quotes Psalm 77 -- "Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known."