A bad cold

I have started to read a biography of John Stuart Mill by Richard Reeves, actually one of the few things I can do at the moment, thanks to some bug that I seem to be sharing with my mother and youngest sister, though I did watch an episode of Torchwood on BBC iPlayer just now. I have also just finished reading a biography of Chopin that I picked up in one of those remaindered books shops, a desperately sad story, Chopin and George Sand, Chopin and his consumption, imagining him on the train from Edinburgh to Manchester to play at a concert before he finally returns to Paris to die. It all reminds me, the despair and paranoia, of Keats, and Benita Eisler also refers to him, dying in Rome. I remember him asking something like, who will deliver me from this posthumous life? And, since I'm not quite firing on all cylinders, I watched a Time Team dig of a Roman villa in the Cotswolds. I seem to suffer from a disturbingly poignant sense of incredulity when I read of life in Roman Briton, or of life in C19th France, for that matter. We can hardly carry the collective burden of memory, the idea that they were like us, at least in their primal emotions, that they rejoiced and grieved, were happy or afraid, and died, but in the real time of human life far in the past but on this very ground. I cannot carry the burden of it in my imagination, and yet my imagination demands that I should do so. The utterly transient meaning of a human life, its finite pulses, but still a human life, still a 'meaning', though that word does not come to me naturally here ... and all, disturbingly, in some complex causal relation to what we are now. Okay, I'm ill. Perhaps the real point is that the poignancy lies in a transferred sense of the transient meaning of my own life, projected into the past but seen therefore as one with it, one brief set of its pulses. But not futile or cancelled by its transience: one thinks of the way that one can zoom out from the Earth and no longer see regions or countries, then zoom out further until the planet has wholly disappeared, and its galaxy, but it is still the case that an adequate description of the planet or the galaxy or the universe will include this slow history of human experience, misery, happiness, wisdom, ignorance. So I end with a kind of Kantian thought, among all these whirling, burning cinders self-conscious life.