I went down to the Piraeus

In June, I contracted covid-19.  Due to a combination of exam stresses and the debaucheries that followed, the infection caught me when my immune system was at its very weakest.  With only a single dose of vaccine for protection, I unfortunately succumbed to long covid.  For the last three months, I have been suffering from severe fatigue, dizziness and migraines, which various remedies have failed to treat.  The result was that my summer took on a shape I did not imagine after I had graduated from Durham.  Gone was the post-graduation holiday, and nights out were no longer an option.  However, my summer itinerary has been no less exciting than I first imagined, and actually involved much more travelling. I was lucky enough to be bedridden in an environment with a well catalogued library.  When you read, you escape from the environment around you.  The concerns of your body dissipate as your mind contemplates the contents of the pages.  It is...

  I've been experimenting with writing some Greek myths to improve my fiction.  This was my favourite of the handful I wrote, and has now become my favourite myth.  It is devoid of the banal love at first sight, or cruel incomprehensible deities that cloud others like Perseus and Medusa.  It is the purest of love stories that also captures the ephemerality of life and fortune.   Hymen, in raven-form, circled above the wedding.  Although it was Orpheus’ honeyed song that hailed him, it was a different strumming than his fabled lyre that reverberated to the god’s ears.  The immortal could hear the caress of scissors against the bride’s thread by the dread Fates.  While he, now transformed, blessed their union and garlanded them with priceless gifts, all he could hear was the cackling of the Morai filtering through the earth.  His trepidation was infectious, there was a nervousness and fidgeting in the god’s mannerisms.  However hard h...

Han’s Holbien’s painting, Christ’s Body in the Tomb that inspired The Idiot This book charts the journey of Mhyskin, a sheltered prince back into 19th Century Russian society following his medically induced exile in Switzerland.  He embodies the Christian morality and generosity of soul that Dostoyevsky prized.  His singular lack of malice or avarice generates suspicion and ridicule from the worldly chattering classes of St Petersburg.  It is both a tragic story for the suffering endured by saintly Mhyskin, and also an indictment of the vice-ridden society who spurn and torment this angelic figure.  Like his other works, the typically bleak setting is dotted with the desperate, dying and deluded.    One of the most memorable dialogues happen almost at the beginning of the book, where Mhyskin reflects on capital punishment and the emotions felt by the condemned.  This part is not a work of fiction.  Dostoevsky himself was sentenced to death, before...

  There is nothing remotely ordinary about the Congo.  To read about it is akin to poring over an anthology of superlatives.  Its reserves of natural resources combined with its vast population give it colossal economic potential.  Its river, that coiled snake extending to the forested depths of the continent, is the second largest in the world by the volume of water it discharges into the Atlantic.  From a literary view, it is often depicted as a realm transcendent of usual human experience.   Conrad wrote of it in Heart of Darkness: ‘ The great wall of vegetation, an exuberant and entangled mass of trunks, branches, leaves, boughs, festoons, motionless in the moonlight, was like a rioting invasion of soundless life, a rolling wave of plants, piled up, crested, ready to topple over the creek, to sweep every little man of us out of his little existence ’ In A Bend in the River, more on that here, V.S. Naipaul describes the ‘ land taking you back to som...

  “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. ” – Heraclitus  Heraclitus is not merely conducting a study of hydrology.  This fragment captures the ephemerality of life.  A river as a physical feature is defined by its flux.  If it stood still, it would be a lake or a pond.  Constant change is no less inherent to life on earth.  Our world is necessarily transient, the planet itself is moving at a thousand miles an hour, our bodies alter with age and our minds with experience.   Most change is gradual.  It is not noticeable day to day, but if you look back, it is unlikely that you feel you are the same person you were a year ago, or even two months prior.  It takes such a moment of perspective to comprehend the forces moving just under our feet.  However, there are some occasions when this usually entropic, gradual change becomes very apparent.  This is when we say good...

Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment traces the inner life of the dark and tormented Raskolnikov after he murders two women.  Before the killing, Raskolnikov believes that his evil will be vindicated by the good he will do after stealing the woman’s money to launch his career.  However, after the murder, feverish guilt, anxiety and disgust at his actions overwhelm him.  In the background, Tsarist St Petersburg is a hellscape, sweltering hot and populated by bestial figures guilty of every vice.  The good are subjected to suffering and derision beneath a deaf heaven.   Even after spending years studying the excesses and brutalities of 2000 years of human history, I found many sections of this book difficult to read.  For me, the most tragic characters of the book were those who had fallen from grace and clung onto their faded grandeur to the mocking of the heartless mob.  Katerina Ivanovna, a well born widow, driven to live in squalor, wracked by tub...