Full circle

I know that I was a bit remiss about posting during the final weeks of my time in England. In part, that's because I went to Berlin (which is my new favorite city), and in part that's because I was so occupied with the idea of having to leave, and not wanting to, that I didn't have much to say. But now that I'm in Richmond, and I've just come back from a British-style pub with Beatles albums, illustrations of men in full tartan dress, and football scarves on the walls -- a pub where you can go to watch football matches, no less -- I feel as if I should write a final installment about the UK. I was there for long enough for it to start to feel like home, long enough that when Kristian picked me up from the airport and we were driving down 90/94, I found that the highway signs looked strange and the cars seemed big and the facades of houses and buildings just seemed different. There's something to be said for this, for the experience of perceiving the place where you've been for quite a long time as if you have just arrived: it's defamiliarization, I suppose. I was at this party in London, in fact, where I was having a conversation about Shklovsky with a composer who turned out to know much more about him than I did, and we were agreeing that it's valuable to see things that are familiar as if they are strange. And now that I'm in a gigantic hotel in the middle of a city I don't know, I could be anywhere, really. The self-sufficient convention center is a world unto itself. In a way it feels like a buffered transition back to life in Chicago. But then again, it's just another place. A place where everyone is giving papers about the eighteenth century, mind you, but just a place. And so in the past week I've walked up Parliament Hill, come back to Chicago, left again; in the process, I've seen the dials of spring turned up and down and up again. If I kept it up it might begin to feel like time travel, but for now it just seems like I've got an established relationship with my suitcases. And after I've soaked up all the eighteenth-century talks I can, I'll saddle up and head back to the midwest for a spring of teaching Milton and getting work done. I look forward to cooking for all of you within range soon!