Twelve Days in the Year: 27th February 2025

There are times when a good night’s sleep is even more of an absolute necessity than usual. As a chronic insomniac who lives with three deranged and demanding cats, I’m used to getting by on the basis of less-than-deep-and-satisfying rest and not enough of it – but ideally not when I then have to get up at five to finish writing a conference paper that really needs another day or so of frantic scribbling as an absolute bare minimum, and then need to be in sparkling improvisational form to compensate for the fact that the topic is miles outside my intellectual comfort zone and, unlike with most things I do, there isn’t any plausible safe space to which I can retreat if necessary. A paper on Thucydides, or the ancient economy, or historiography, or decadence, or Marx, or Nietzsche, fine; within those topics, there are things I can talk about where I’m confident that I know more than most people, and if the discussion starts to feel perilous then I can drag it off in that direction. When it comes to the philological conceptions of Friedrich Creuzer, about which I am speaking this morning, I don’t have much idea of exactly how little I know, let alone how much anyone else will know. Does the fact that I can’t find a lot of relevant scholarship indicate that this is largely uncharted territory so I’m relatively safe, or on the contrary that my research has been inadequate? As will probably be my epitaph, this paper seemed like a good idea at the time…

And so of course I sleep abysmally, even without feline disturbances. Playing a bit of music doesn’t help – at best I drift off for twenty minutes or so, not even making it to the end of the record. Some of this may, I suspect, be that light sleep where you dream you’re awake, which I find more tiring than actually being awake; most of it definitely is being awake, desperately aware of how the theoretical possibility of a decent number of hours is steadily diminishing. It’s not even that the room is especially noisy, despite it being London (yes, I’m conscious of becoming ever more like Gussie Fink-Nottle, pining for the countryside and my newts); a few sirens but no serious disturbances in the corridor, just an inability to drop off.

Just after 3 am I give up and start working on the paper, on the basis that I’m now so tired and headachy that it will take me twice as long to finish it. Pause for a cup of (horrible) tea at four; no biscuits provided. Another cup of tea at half five. The good news is that the prior thinking and planning up to this point still seem to be making sense; the bad news is that I feel too tired and unsure of the material to risk just talking from notes, so have to write out the whole paper. By the time hotel breakfast starts at seven I’ve written three out of four sections – whether it makes the slightest sense goodness knows, but it’s something to hold on to that may be sufficiently coherent; the major issue is going to be timing, as I have no idea if the text is too short or, more likely, too long, even before we get into my tendency to ramble even more than usual when tired.

The coffee at breakfast is truly dreadful – even the usual trick with crappy hotel coffee machines of combining an espresso with a flat white or milk coffee doesn’t help – but a dose of traditional stodge helps tide me over (I’ll pay for this later, but at this moment what’s needed is meat, fat, carbohydrates and sugar in some combination). Back to the room to finish the final part of the paper, desperately casting around for something resembling a conclusion or connection to the conference theme – although I have the safety net of being able to blame the organiser for suggesting this topic to me in the first place. By this point my brain has decided to tease me by coming up with further interesting ideas – that call for a few more days of research and further thought.

Onwards to the conference. Currently it feels as if it would be wonderful if it were one of those huge events where it’s easy to get lost in the crowd, rather than a dinky bespoke research workshop where everyone is being friendly and chatty, let alone where there are various old friends and acquaintances whom I haven’t seen for many years… It feels rather awkward to be withdrawn and curmudgeonly, given that part of Creuzer’s schtick was that the good philologist should also be a decent human being (hey, I’m not really a philologist…), but I just don’t have the mental bandwidth for chitchat. Also not sure that I can adequately calibrate the tone of various questions I have on some of the papers in the first session, even assuming that my queries aren’t just the product of tired misunderstanding rather than critical acumen, so largely stay quiet and mentally promise to talk to the speakers later. In fact the questions to one poor PhD student are far harsher than I would ever have been, but thankfully they’re handled confidently. Another speaker, talking about mid-C19 Polish scholars, quotes one criticising Creuzer; dammit, everything I’ve read suggests that by this date he was completely ignored by everyone. Clearly I know nothing. Make a marginal note to mention it, in the hope that this deflects potential awkward question. I accumulate rather a lot of these notes…

Time for my paper. Well, I get away with it; miraculously, the material fits the allotted time almost exactly, so I barely have to hurry up in the final sections, the response is friendly and interested, and people say nice things in the lunch break afterwards. I really do not merit this. Clearly the primary reason is that no one else knows much more about Creuzer than I do, but I think there are a couple of other factors: I speak very clear ‘BBC’ English, which non native speakers always appreciate; the subject matter organises itself into a logical structure without much need for me to kick it into shape, so the whole thing flows plausibly; and, as a middle-aged white male professor, I tend to sound authoritative even when making self-deprecating remarks about my limited knowledge. Basically, I am human ChatGPT, and people should be much more sceptical about the output, but currently I am too tired to feel ashamed.

I take the opportunity of an hour for lunch for an energetic walk to to try to clear my head a bit before the afternoon session – which isn’t wholly successful due to encountering too many slow-moving tourists, but definitely better than nothing. The afternoon papers show a distinct philosophical tendency, for which I am not entirely in the mood – they sound like things I ought to know about, like early Nietzsche or notions of historical time, but nothing is connecting at all. I feel very slow and stupid, and can only hope that I’ve been sufficiently constructive in earlier discussion, especially yesterday, to be given leeway. Also, the lunchtime sandwiches are weighing heavily on my stomach. The final paper, Jonas Grethlein offering his latest take-down of Wilamowitz’ conception of philology, is clear and thought-provoking, and also provides copious examples of the great scholar’s astonishingly purple and pompous prose – W not G, I should say – so a positive note on which to conclude for the day. But if Grethlein hasn’t grown even taller in the years since I last saw him, I am definitely shrinking.

I offer my apologies for the conference dinner; rare for me to turn down a free meal, especially as they are not going to the overly-familiar Greek restaurant that usually seems to be the venue for London events, but I am feeling far too tired to wait until eight o’clock for food and struggle to hear what anyone is saying. Walk back to the hotel via a supermarket to pick up a few snacks and a couple of cans of beer; log into my jazz composition class, which I had otherwise been set to miss, or rather to follow only via the recording – it’s not that I can make a huge amount of sense of the material on slash chords and modal structures in my present state, but it passes the time – and then talk briefly to A. on the phone before going to bed a bit before nine, hoping that this time I will sleep…