I wake up no worse than yesterday. This is true at least in terms of bodily discomfort—I have mild covid, uninterestingly—but it may also be true morally, I don’t know. I have emails to write. Analysis, Thermodynamics, Medieval Lit, Chinese 4—a whole host of unexcused absences, since the student health center said I could go to class as long as I remained unfevered. That’s fair enough, I would be fine sniffling and coughing in the back, but the paranoia about getting someone else sick prevents me. At least work has already been cancelled for unrelated reasons. I try to read the flurry of emails which theoretically explains why, but all I can gather is that we left the place a mess while our boss was away. I don’t remember anyone trashing it, and I don’t entirely understand how cancelling will punish us, but it suits me well enough. 

The email to my Chinese professor is the hardest. On a recent homework assignment, I wrote, in Mandarin, that if suffering is inevitable, it is better to be at once unhappy and successful than to be merely unhappy. I don’t know if I believe this, but the point of learning a second language does not seem to be the ability to express your own thoughts so much as the ability to express someone’s thoughts with grammatical adeptness. Unfortunately this email about having covid must be true, or close to true. The vocabulary of being sick has always stymied me—does this verb, 感染, mean “to infect” or “to be infected”? Should I throw in a 被 and make it passive, just in case? But then the omission of the doer will glare up at me. I give up and use 有, the verb “to have,” letting English logic stumble awkwardly into Chinese. She’ll know what I mean; it’s her job to know what the Americans mean when they forget that all of language is coincidence and unexamined habit. 

It’s only ten thirty. I write down what I’ve done so far and examine the result. I remember that I hate writing personal narrative. I decide to stick to short, declarative sentences. I loathe the outcome as much as but no more than any other stylistic option, and hope no one reads it. 

I need to read more Beowulf now. It’s Maria Dahvana Headley’s translation, which I am enjoying, but I wish it were a side-by-side version. I get the Norton out, and Seamus Heaney’s, which has his version on the odd pages and the original on the even. Not that I can make much of Old English, but I’m trying to recreate the thrill I felt when, while reading “The Fortunes of Men,” I understood “fiþerleas feallan” in the description of the one who dies falling, wingless, from a tree.

The problem with Old English, compared with Middle or Early Modern, is that the system of declensions had yet to erode enough for my tastes. I can identify words, but their grammatical interrelations are hidden, impervious to me. When people tell me Chinese is a hard language to learn for English speakers, I agree, but point out that it doesn’t even require conjugation. Learn the vocabulary and string the words together, and there it is. Language. Approximately. But Latin and German and Russian fight back, each word desperate to contain its own context and action and motive. 

For English, by the time you reach Chaucer, things are better; I have a theory that 80% of reading Middle English is just relaxing. Years ago, I scoffed at Socrates in “Meno,” convinced as he is that the slave boy’s noncommittal answers to his leading questions prove that geometry is known innately. Now, I am forced to acknowledge that I have evolved a similar belief, confident that the only reason people struggle to read older texts is that they panic and convince themselves of the foreign impenetrability of the language. This theory is probably not true, but that puts no hamper on my belief of it. 

It slows me down, reading four versions of the same thing at once. I deny myself the use of a sword and a broad yellow shield in battle, I hereby renounce sword and the shelter of the broad shield, the heavy war-board, no sword, no shield, no safety net, nothing but my grip, a hand-clasp battle to the death, ic þæt þonne forhicge þæt ic sweord bere oþðe sidne scyld, geolorand to guþe. I copy the passage that begins like that, four times, into my miscellany. The assignment is to collect excerpts of the texts we read, organized around some theme, and keep them in a little unlined notebook. Thus far, my theme seems to be “the parts I like,” but I have all semester to come up with a plausible lie to give them coherence. 

Then there’s thermo reading to do. The author of the textbook is trying to explain what temperature is. My professor warned it would take at least eight weeks to get a satisfactory answer. So far, the book has used a hypothetical molecule trapped in a box to show that temperature is that which has something to do with energy. We retread old ground—PV=nRT, or else PV=NkT—but the author is careful, and insists we regard pressure as a thing incidentally related to temperature, not as the basis of a definition. I like this way of defining: pacing the perimeter of a concept, seeing who visits it and who stays away, and only very slowly approaching. I can see it right there—temperature, napping in the sun—but I’ve been warned that it startles at sudden movements. A former Chinese professor liked to lecture us in a similar vein,

insisting that any bilingual dictionary was fundamentally deceitful, pretending that some one-to-one function easily took one language as its input and naturally produced another as its output. The only way to know what a word meant, he said, was to know what it meant in its own home, surrounded by its native web of meaning. The absurd cyclicality of implementing that as a pedagogical approach appealed to me; I imagine a classroom where no one ever progresses, because asking the meaning of one word only leads you further into unknown territory. 

Around two I lose momentum. I eat leftover eggplant parmesan. I watch Leonard Cohen’s live London performance of “Take This Waltz” from 2008. I look up the lyrics, even though I know them, and scroll past the unwanted AI summary. I linger over the section of other questions Google thinks I might want to know the answer to. 

People also ask: 

“What was Leonard Cohen suffering from?” 

I don’t look at the answer. I like the question too much to have it contextualized by some particularity. It assumes—and moreover forces you to regard such an assumption as not only reasonable but indispensable, not worth mentioning—that Leonard Cohen suffered. The question does not allow argument on that point, that necessary premise, and only asks for a cause, a categorization. I imagine answers: from a nicotine addiction, from writer’s block, from the problem of being Leonard Cohen, from suffering. 

The dip-pen I ordered arrives. I’ve been using a 0.3 micron for my miscellany, but my writing looks flat and unappealing. I practice using the pen with another section from Beowulf, four times over. I accidentally change “sinning soul” to “spinning soul,” and immediately conclude the change is an improvement. Grendel now bicycles his way to hell, sans one arm and most of his dignity. My writing is uneven, though, widening as I copy the Old English, which requires more concentration and care because of the unfamiliar trajectory of the words. Frustrated, I revert to illustrating previous excerpts, pretending that this task is necessary and productive. I spend an easy five hours hunched over the notebook, forcing myself to be unaware of the things I should actually be working on. The ink tastes like progress, although of course it isn’t. 

In the evening, I get my Chinese homework back and learn that my sentence about suffering is incomprehensible. I pretend that it is the content my professor objected to, and not my clumsy language. Surely, when she says “这句话意思不清楚,”—“the meaning of this sentence is not clear”—she is telling me that if it will bring you no joy, give up on the striving. Be indolent and unhappy, and you will have been wiser than the miserable misers. This is a very unlikely interpretation, given her personality. It is someone else’s aphorism, perhaps mine, perhaps not. I try to decide how I feel about the day, but I fail to conjure anything definite. I did more than I might have but less than I could have, a failure at both versions of the sentence, neither successful nor relaxed. On the other hand, I was not especially unhappy. It was a conditional, after all, and negating the hypothesis makes the conclusion irrelevant. I go back to drawing a cuckoo.

David Chritton is a college student in South Bend, Indiana, studying English Literature and Physics & Applied Mathematics.