The second half of last week I was confined to the home nursing some sort of a bug. I was pretty sick for a few days, very sore throat, stuffed up nose and chest, headache, the whole nine. Spent a lot of time on the couch, under a blanket. At some point in time it occurred to me that I might well start taking my temperature. On my first reading, it was a little high. Sometime later, it was a little higher. Meanwhile, I was reading a novel (Hernan Diaz's Trust, a pretty good read so far and I'm guessing it just gets better) in which characters spend time at Swiss sanatoria.
And there it was. Sitting under my blanket, taking my temperature, thinking of Alps while looking down at the grey of winter, I was the spitting image of Hans Castorp, our hero in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I was lacking only a coterie of fellow-sufferers with whom I could discuss the finer points of one type of thermometer vs the other, the various factors which might influence one's temperature and/or its measurement, the nature of freedom, the dimensions of time, and so on into infinity.
Then I remembered my blog.
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