back to school

She thought, he will never be so happy again, but stopped herself, remembering how it angered her husband that she should say that. Still, it was true. They were happier now than they would ever be again. ...She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they woke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-room after breakfast, which they did every day of their lives, was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories...
-V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse

First week of Trinity Term: the weather's been erratic, shifting aimlessly from short bursts of rain to such promising sun and blue sky that we brought our books and a blanket onto the lawn today, like maybe we were in New England in May. The gnats and the cold drove us indoors pathetically soon.
I'm all about lectures this week (and hopefully for the rest of the term); now that I know where most of the buildings are, it's much much easier to show up for random things. Today I went to the first in a four-lecture series on "Topics in Early Modern History," the first topic being, Women. Next week, Food; then, Poverty; lastly, Childhood. I like this person's abrupt fashion of titling lectures, especially as there are no colons involved.
My first tutorial's on Friday and my room is crowded with Woolf--collected essays, biographies, plus every one of her novels I could find in my house and fit into my suitcase. The problem that I'm facing now is that, unlike the Victorians who make me think, Woolf--and Katherine Mansfield, and sometimes D.H. Lawrence--make me feel. So that I stare stupidly at a passage, saying, 'Oh isn't that lovely!' and brimming up with emotion, and wanting urgently to write, just not the kind of writing my assignments require. I feel a bit paralyzed when it comes to analysis. It's embarrassing, too, to re-read this particular copy of To the Lighthouse and see the intense underlining and margin notes from the last two times I read it: I've written absolutely nothing useful about the text, just exclamations like 'beautiful!' and non-words like 'mmmmmm.'
In other news, Naima and I watched Love & Basketball to soothe our hangovers on Sunday; a couple evenings from now, Elizabeth is taking us out to a French dinner on the JYA fund; and Jenny is visiting Oxford next week. The ducks are spending more time by the lake than they are by my window, but at least they haven't been *culled* for fear of the flu, so I'm thankful. And I've expanded the contents of my refrigerator to include humous.