In Which A Meeting of Some Import Is Attended
At long last, your scribe, after an extended absence from the pages of this electronic memoir, which he would be greatly pleased to attribute to something fascinating and romantic–such as an expedition by airship to chart the legendary lost continent of Atlantis, followed perhaps by a convalescence at a Tuscan villa to recover from months of endless vistas of sea and sky and Professor Arronax leaning out of windows trying to spot the precise bit of water the Nautilus once passed under and periodically shouting “There! Right there! Don’t you see it?”–but the blame for which, in all honesty, can only be laid before his own recalcitrance as a regular correspondent . . . in short, your scribe once again has something to report.
Recently, as the heading of this journal entry might suggest, I attended a Meeting of Some Import. For those who are familiar with my current academic circumstances, the venue of this meeting–the Semitic Museum at Harvard University–will give a fairly strong clue as to the agenda. Indeed, it was a rare opportunity to escape my exile in, as Coleridge described it, this “strange place . . . where Time and weary Space / Fettered from flight, with night-mare sense of fleeing, / Strive for their last crepuscular half-being.” So it was that, with a sense of boundless optimism matched only by a case of the jitters roughly the size and shape of the RMS Titanic, I set off for the far horizon.