I was thinking of something, but I don't remember what. I thought I'd learn some German vocabulary for a few minutes, and when I'd finished I'd forgotten what I was going to write about.

There are other things, however.

The woman at the table next to me who is typing so ineptly on her laptop's keyboard. What an odd device. How much better could it be without the keyboard? Even if the screen also forces the form factor. I don't know which is more amazing: that people don't mind mastering their tools so poorly (with computers, that works in so many ways, and even I never learnt to touch type properly), or that we don't design better.

The idea that I must practise writing well, or my skill will decline. Heck, it probably already has. If nothing else, the fact that I read so much more than I write seriously must mean that I'm losing whatever style I had, or that it is stultifying, drying up, becoming a fossilised caricature of its former self. Or more probably seeping away into bland impersonality.

I wonder whether it's the will or the passion or the skill I really lack. I shouldn't forget that all three deficiencies can be rectified.

I picked up a Latin composition primer earlier today and was amazed by some of the basic differences between Latin and English prose that were sketched, making of Latin a language much more alien than anything European I've studied. I suppose that literary style is a more important part of thought than I've realised, and I wonder if late mediaeval Latin isn't therefore rather closer to modern English than, perhaps, whatever Caesar's Germanic contemporaries spoke. The fact that metaphors were used rarely and turned into similes, that Latin syntax (if that's the right term) evolved markedly in a century (from Caesar to Livy); what am I missing in English?

Maybe I have just enough thoughts that I don't have to worry too much about those I drop.

25th November 2008