Navel Gazing*
This post would be much more lively if that's what I'd actually been doing. Navel gazing, that is. As it is, rather than sitting with my beard* pressed hard against my chest, my body curled in upon itself and my lips saying over and over again, " Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me "--the prescription for navel-gazing as championed by the fourteenth-century Orthodox hesychasts --I've been reading Gaudy Night (1935) and wondering what the point of it all is. Not the story, everyone knows that: will Harriet finally say yes to Lord Peter's proposal of marriage? But the setting: the life of the mind as practiced in Oxford and the lure of scholarship as one's "proper job". It's clear to anybody who knows anything about Dorothy Sayers' career that in this novel she was asking herself some hard questions about her own career, thus far given to writing mystery novels, like her character Harriet, but soon to be given over to the work of wri...