a scholar in sweatpants

This serious and seriously beautiful photograph was taken last Friday – prior to the weekend I became a scholar in sweatpants – by the lovely Mrs S. Do note how my outfit matches the Starbucks cup, comrades: that’s a little something called color coordination. Friday was one of the hottest days we’ve had here in a while, and I don’t think I had worn tights under my shorts if I knew that when leaving the house in the morning.

This weekend I realized that sweatpants are the stressed scholar’s best friend; also, they’re a weapon of mass destruction to be employed at one own discretion [and preferably exercised far away from public view]. I spent two whole days in my room, without putting on proper clothes and without doing my make-up, writing my paper for folkore from noon to ten in the evening on Saturday and from noon till eight pm on Sunday. I stopped for a late lunch and/or early dinner twice [once each day] and didn’t go outside but focused all of my need for social interaction on Critical Companion who tonight asked me with a trembling voice of concern: “You’re going to campus tomorrow, right? You’re going take a shower now, right?” But I made some progress on my work: on Saturday, I wrote twelve pages of analysis of cultural forms from prison, and on Sunday, I wrote seven pages of introduction with historical background. [I already had one page from a previous delirious occasion before I began this scholarly madness.] Now all I have to do is wrap things up in a neat conclusion – no more than four pages – and I’m done. But the truth is that you’re never done. Or at least I won’t be done once this paper is finished. I have plenty of other stuff to which I will devote due attention during this week, the r-r-r-week at Berkeley [when the pirates come to campus]…

In the midst of all of this academic seriousness, I came across the following fascinating paragraph in volume I of Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago GULAG [though it is only remotedly connected to the topic of my folklore paper mentioned above – everything on Russian prisons has something to do with Dostoevsky’s Siberian Notebook – it is an important work in my field of interest which I have only now begun to read]:

«Полтавская победа была несчастием для России: она потянула за собой два столетия великих напряжений, разорений, несвободы – и новых, новых войн. Полтавское поражение было спасительно для шведов: потеряв охоту воевать, шведы стали самым процветающим и свободным народом в Европе.*»

“The victory at Poltava was a misfortune for Russia: it entailed two centuries of great stress, devastation, unfreedom – and new, new wars. The defeat at Poltava was redeeming for the Swedes: having lost their will to wage war, the Swedes became the most prosperous and free people in Europe.*”

But what is most interesting about the paragraph is the little star which directs us to the bottom of the page:

*Может быть только в XX веке, если верить рассказам, застоявшаяся их сытость привела к моральной ожоге.

* Perhaps only in the twenthieth century, if one trusts the stories, their stagnant satiation led to a moral ulcer.

You can always trust Solzhenitsyn to tell it like it is, comrades.