Intermezzo

Weekdays they serve continental breakfast down at the dining hall: cereals, bagels, bread, last night's dessert (?!), from time to time a piece of fruit -- grapefruit or melons or something. It's far from fancy but I appreciate their consideration. It's a minor disappointment that they don't continue on weekends, leaving their students to forage. I am no good at foraging. I'm not even allowed to install a refrigerator here.

On the credit slate, it removes all compulsion to awake and arise by a specified hour, say, in time for half past nine, (when they stop serving breakfast). So the day can grow organically, like a malformed metaphor, without the spark of internal combustion polluting the pond, nor the lure of activity descending below the surface to catch an unwary fish or snag a plant reaching too high.

This morning I watch chess online ("European Club Championship," very exciting). Later I read books. Yesterday I went to the library in the vain hope of finding something I might potentially possibly be able to decipher on the subject of Galois representations. I was thwarted in this hope. Perhaps what I was looking for does not exist. All I know is I'd have had a better time of it if they'd bothered to put the math card catalogue in the math library, say where they currently keep the biology card catalogue. So I'm stuck with my current books. I got the compilation of Feynman's letters. Feels a little voyeuristic when he's writing to his wife and fifty pages of "congratulations on winning the Nobel" was slightly too many. But it makes something of a contrast to, say, Napoleon's memoirs.

By Tuesday there should be more work to keep my attention. A pretty pace they'll (I'll) have to make to make it worthwhile by December. Meanwhile: still sleepy, not quite prospering, just -- languid Saturday....