The dormant creature stirreth again...

"And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist's skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, untied in their variety and varied in their unity, unique in their diversity and diverse in apta coadunatio, in wondrous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material--there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, of all the grasses that adorn the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam"--The Name of the Rose

Yeah, it's been over a month since my last post.  I really wish there was more to write about!  When this pandemic is finally past, I'll be on the move again and have more material...

I'm now reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (for the second time) for my book club.  It's cleverly structured, working on more than one level:  both intellectual loftiness and more basic storytelling.  That's the one about a 14th century friar investigating murders at an Italian monastery.  His name is William of Baskerville, and that Sherlock Holmes reference gives you an idea of the book's sensibility.

Next month's History Meetup will be about the Roman Empire, so I'm also reading Matthew Denison's The Twelve Caesars:  The Dramatic Lives of the Emperors of Rome.  It covers the early emperors, from Julius Caesar to Domitian.  Suetonius' famous history of the same group is his main source, of course, but not the only one.

Moira and I have been watching HBO's Baltimore police procedural series The Wire again. (I still haven't seen the last two seasons.) It's a real classic!

I've been preparing the back yard garden for planting.  We already have three raised frames, and I've set up a fourth though without the wooden walls. (John also set up a small frame in the northwest corner and planted rhubarb in it.) We recently rebuilt the front edge of the lawn, setting up a low wall, and I used many of the patio tiles it replaced to set up a walkway around the new frame.

Yesterday I had lunch with Maria and Sergey.  We ate takeout on a rooftop at the Yonge & Eglinton Centre.  My scalp got sunburned! Because I was in that area, I ordered our Tuesday falafel wraps from a different branch of Ali Baba's.