Self finally finished The Peloponnesian War! It took ages — like, 10 days. Those cunning Greeks just seemed to bleed out by the end, crushed by centrifugal force.
She’s beginning a new book, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind.
She’s never read Siri Hustvedt before, but this book was on many “Best of the Year” lists, and she was intrigued.
Since she found The Peloponnesian War truly exhausting (and she hopes Hustvedt isn’t), she’s decided to make it easy on herself and attack the longest essay first, The Delusions of Certainty. There’s an argument about life and death and oh well — is summer brain really colonizing self’s mind? The first sentence was not a grabber, but further down the first paragraph she encountered this:
What constitutes death is also unclear, although once a corpse begins to putrefy, all doubt vanishes.
— from the essay “coming in and going out”
Kanlaon 