Egypt Calls

The library's recall of Lampe's Patristic Lexicon has left me in a bit of an expensive quandary: to buy my own copy or not? It's vastly expensive, but I could spend pounds and pounds if I indulge in constantly recalling it myself for redelivery. Would that there was an online version! If I don't eat for a month or two......

I've been reading, in a very desultory fashion, C.J.Sansom's Revelation......and to be honest I'm not really getting into it. Maybe it's the 'historical mystery' genre ('Morse in hose', as the hero has been dubbed) - not really my thing although I really enjoyed The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl - but I think that I'm not really enjoying the way that it's written....it seems almost too straightforward and clear, almost as if it were written for teenagers. Writing by numbers, if you like. I probably won't persist as I picked up a copy of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and, having read the first few pages the quality of the prose just hit me between the eyes. Fantastic! The languourousness of humid Alexandria reminds me (unsurprisingly) of Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy which are among my absolute favourite books. It makes me want to read the poems of Constantine Cavafy again.I hope I'll be eventually able to source a charity shop copy of my own. Still waiting for Sum to arrive, but when it does, I can slot the separate tales between the Durrell chapters.

An Old Man: by Constantine Cavafy.

At the noisy end of the cafe,

head bent over the table, an old man sits alone,

a newspaper in front of him.

And in the miserable banality of old age

he thinks how little he enjoyed the years

when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.

He knows he's aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.

Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.

So brief an interval, so brief.

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,

how he always believed - what madness -

that cheat who said: "Tomorrow. You have plenty of time."

He remembers impulses bridled, the joy he sacrificed.

Every chance he lost

now mocks his senseless caution.

But so much thinking, so much remembering

makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,

his head resting on the cafe table.