If neither brass, nor marble, can withstand
The mortal force of Time’s destructive hand;
If mountains sink to vales, if cities die,
And less’ning rivers mourn their fountains dry;
When my old cassock, said a Welsh divine,
Is out at elbows, why should I repine?
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“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