Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality (one for each and never the same for everyone) which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
“I went to Oxford in 1979 to study classics and philosophy; I wanted the kind of formation that lunatic Pound had had, I also wanted to be able to tell a good argument from bad. So I spent an unconscionable amount of time reading the whole of Homer in Greek, the whole of Virgil in Latin (among many others); I decided at one point that I could not know anything about Greek tragedy unless I had read all extant texts, so I read the whole of Greek tragedy one summer. I didn’t have much money; I didn’t have much of a social life.”
Helen DeWitt