I hadn’t read The Mask of Apollo in ever so long, so when I went to the shelf looking for some comfort book, something to read without worry or strain, I hunted that one out. It was only moderately successful.
Oh, I read it, and I enjoyed reading it, and I was moved, again, by Niko’s love affairs. I just wasn’t very comforted. I’m not sure why. I don’t even think that there are, in the book, the kind of resonances with Our Situation that there are in some of her Greek books. Dion does not, for instance, lead an invasion against a foreign foe on false pretenses, the disastrous failure of which sets up the populace for disastrous vulnerability to demagogues and tyranny.
I actually typed pedagogues there. A populace disastrounsly vulnerable to pedagogues. And tyrants, of course. Pedagoguery and tyranny go together like ... things and stuff. And that other thing. More of a triumvirate, really.
No, I don’t think it was the echoes of any current concern that sapped the comfort from my comfort book. I suspect it was just one of those things. Perhaps, in retrospect, I wasn’t as interested in comfort as I thought I was. Perhaps I ought to have attacked some meaty work of philosophy (such as I have on the bottom shelf, with bookmarks helpfully reminding me where I left off). Perhaps at the moment of decision I ought to have done some household chore rather than picking up a book at all. But how to know?
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.