Books, and an Addendum to Last Week's Installment

Blah blah blah, currently reading

1. Rites of Spring - Modris Eksteins

and

2. The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

and they're both quite good, but not especially interesting fodder for a blog entry. Also, my 5-year-old laptop decided today to cease to function on any internet-related level; I'm now working with a borrowed and unfamiliar laptop, and its keyboard clickiness and touchpad ultra-sensitivity are freaking me out, as is the presence of a "2/@" key, as my own computer lost its at some point in 2004. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I'm not quite up for a cursory analysis of a 396-page cultural history of World War I, or of a [considerably briefer] novel on adultery, religion, and death.

What I am up for is a brief continuation of last week's little trip to Cambridge, as we happened to bypass someplace rather important [to me, and probably me alone] while in the region: the district of Huntingdonshire, or, rather, the remnants of the Anglican religious community that once was based there: Little Gidding. I'll refrain from quoting Eliot, since I've already done it ad nauseam on this blog, (but you really still ought to read him). I will, however, just add that this is St. John's Church -- which he visited in 1936, which inspired much of the poem -- in the 1960s, thirty years after that visit but probably not terribly changed:

It's somewhat astonishing to think that such a humble structure could inspire the greatness that is "Little Gidding," yet that's rather the thing, isn't it? The history is what matters;

So, while the fails
On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England. (237-9)

What's that? I went for the quote anyway? And yet I feel remarkably unguilty.