Carthago delenda est

Reader, the general turbulence attending our move from Provo, a haven named for an otherwise unknown French settler, to New Haven, a bedlam named in a badly disappointed hope for the New Jerusalem; together with the extremities attending Eli’s and our recent ordeal, have caused something of an interruption in the history of this illustrious blog. For a time, we have had to abandon the blog’s jovial tone and dispassionate, third-person voice in favor of a more intimate and sober style more germane to the events narrated. Our staff wishes at this moment, however, to assure our international (intergalactic?) readership that the perpetuation of our illustrious Review has not been pre-empted, only deferred. We plan next Sunday to present an anxious public with such a Week in Review as may leave the reader fairly dazzled. Indeed, the pent-up torrents of our genius may then burst forth in such a majesty of prose as may make Gibbon’s rolling periods seem droll, make Voltaire’s elegant verve seem vapid, make Bolingbroke’s vigorous declamations seem puny whimpers, make all that you have known and loved in the Reviews of the past seem but a prologue to the billowing surge of diverting eloquence that is to be. But first a tasty morsel about the latter part of this week to whet your appetite.

Thursday (31 August 2006):
In the evening Justin went to dinner with his Dean’s Group. Not quite up to general socializing after the emotional taxing of the previous days, he quickly fell into conversation with an Italian L.L.M. student in the group, warding off the overtures of eager socialites in the group by pretending he didn’t speak English. When the group sat in a circle, introducing themselves with a brief educational bio and a briefer statement of their fondest memory of the past year, Justin effectively distanced himself from those whose fondest memory involved backpacking in Southern Asia or a bacchanalian romp on the Riviera by singling out the birth of his daughter, Eli, as his fondest memory. He further made himself conspicuous by stealing out of the dinner shortly after 8 o’clock, insisting it was time he got home. His family needed him.
Earlier in the day, Eli composed the following elegiac “Farewell to August”:

O muggy month of August,
Thou art anything but august.
Only an elegist quite the groggiest
With notions quite the foggiest,
Could bid thee fond farewell.

Friday (1 September 2006):
September greeted us with something less interminable a downpour than that with which August bade us adieu. The Big Blue Bull, beleaguered after a cross-country trek and so many desperate searches for hospital parking, had been threatening of late to stop the abuse by overheating. Knowing it was probably time for an oil change anyway, Justin thought he’d take the bull to Jiffy Lube for that purpose and, while there, ask the workers to see what might be causing the near-overheating. Alas, Justin learned that this great American corporation, as its name suggests, only performs services it can effect “in a jiffy,” and that taking the time to figure out what was wrong was something they just could not do. The worker helpfully offered, though, to flush out the radiator for a hundred dollars—apparently just for the devil of it; Justin declined. Nonplussed, Justin pulled out the volume of Will Durant he had lovingly packed and made his way to the waiting room to read it. What was his dismay when he found that said waiting room was dominated, body and soul, by the thumping tones of rap “music” videos blaring from the television. It rained outside so Justin felt stuck. Abandoning Durant, he quickly grabbed the available literature most suited to the environs, which turned out to be The Sporting News: College Football Preview Edition. He left Jiffy Lube a better man for having had his oil changed and having learned all about just how much everyone in South Bend, Indiana loves that devilishly handsome Brady Quinn.
Meantime Julia, who was supposed to be taking a nap, steeled her nerves in cold defiance, boasting to her overtired mother’s dismay that she could “stay awake until the crack of doom.” Earlier in the morning Eli, who hadn’t apparently endured enough physical agony for one week, begged Lia to take her to the Yale Health Plan for some delectable immunization shots. Actually, Lia expressed some concern about her getting shots so soon after a major operation but the Health Plan folk insisted enigmatically that the moment was “immunologically ideal” (and Justin had thought, as a neophyte law student, that balderdash phraseology was the sole province of lawyers). Eli was brave, perhaps hoping that somehow word of her courage would fall upon the ears of the adored Ezra Bloomfield (incidentally, the next day there arrived in the mail some early masterpieces of art by Ezra’s older brother, Sam—one each for Julia and Eli; Eli rejoiced, for family favor is always a favorable portent).

Saturday (2 September):
“Perhaps the longest and dullest day in living memory,” wrote Julia in her diary as she pensively prepared for bed. We were largely confined to the house by resurgent and implacable rains. Julia and Justin did make one venture out to a local grocer and to a local establishment of the evil empire (Wal-mart, of course) for some routine purchases, as well as for some essential buys (mainly a toilet plunger). Julia fell asleep in the car between Stop-and-Shop and Sam Walton’s cesspool of capitalistic corruption; as a result, she sat woozily in the cart at Wal-mart, bobbing to and fro like any given high priest during any given Sunday service.
Eli, waxing vivacious in her sense of post-operational liberty, made herself known by trilling odd owl sounds at intervals throughout the day. She also displayed her protean napping abilities by sleeping for many different periods of time, but all of them briefer than forty-five minutes. When she wasn’t nodding, nearly napping, Eli was living high, demanding that she be carried about the house in the style of a miniature Cleopatra, with pauses allowable only when indulged before a readily visible mirror (whatever else her operation rekindled, it appears to have awaken her vanity—and we had begun to think her hardly a Suttner). Somehow, amid the drudgery of our sabbatical monasticism, we did survive the day. After the girls had gone to bed, Justin reluctantly abandoned his first foray into the reading of case law—tearing himself from The Law of Torts after seven of the most gripping pages in the literature of the world—to introduce Lia to a real cinematic classic, Cold Comfort Farm. Lia, after swallowing an early scene involving a hayloft with a grain of salt, found herself able not to despise the film; Justin was in raptures, and has ever since been quoting favorite lines and chanting the hymnody of the Society of Quivering Brethren (though he’s not sure the words are quite right):

Whatever shall we do, O Lord,
When Gabriel blows his trumpet over
Hill and vale and ford and river,
When Thy fiery flames descend
The earth will burn but we will quiver!

It really is a beautiful film, though hardly recommendable to the uninitiated.

And now, somnolent reader, we salute you with an anticipatory gesture toward the next installment of our Week in Review.