With Great, or Small, Power

Last week I read the endnotes of a Larousse edition of Candide that T.'s and my former French teacher sent from Canada. They were by Jean Goldzink and I enjoyed them. The observations were less of-their-time and jargon-filled than in introductions I'd read for other French literary classics of Voltaire's time; rounded; and written in an old-fashioned vocabulary. Because I like 19th century and Edwardian literature so much, I am fond of meandering sentences and a far-roaming vocabulary. But I suspect — based on listening to British parliamentary debates, for example — that a refined and elite speaker uses a word-set understandable to everyone, which expresses ideas with structured force and economy. And his writing is a good example.

Work was a deluge from Tuesday until Thursday, but by Friday I decided that I had the right to work at a not-so-killing pace. Although I still wanted to bang my head against the wall now and then. The fact sank in yet again that with my new title came new responsibilities, but surprisingly not just the management responsibilities that I mentioned in the last post. Receiving a double workload due to requests from other parts of the company, which has grown in size since I began working there in May 2016, hammered in that point. As a result I began to concentrate far more on organization last week, filtering old messages in my email account, and creating spreadsheets for current tasks and a list of tasks to do — or to delegate to others to do — in future. This list was less than encouraging as it grew longer and longer within the space of a day, and by the time I'd reached 40+ tasks I felt exhausted by the thought. That said, there are others in the company who handle a far higher volume of requests. So in theory it's feasible to handle them all.

So reading Candide literary criticism and, now, Matthew Arnold's essay collection Culture and Anarchy (which it is fun to disagree with almost all the time) for ten minutes or so in the mornings and evenings, although that is not unchallenging in some ways, was a pleasant distraction from the fray.