day two of being sick - persistent pain spreading across the back of my skull - and still the inability to concentrate. drowsiness. sentences don't form, though how much of it is due to pain and tiredness and how much of it part of my own decreased facility with language. i am going to be late for class - it's going to start in ten minutes and i am still here trying to finish up the paper. perhaps i will stay here and just finish - force myself to finish - concentrate - a sentence at a time - and write it. if i can just finish this paper i would feel a whole lot better than if i went to class and felt guilty about the paper, and then still have to face an unfinished paper afterwards, and at least now i've got my mind mostly on one thing, and want to think it through - who knows, if i get it done before class ends i might even go and turn it in, or go and see her after class and turn it in, late and with apologies but at. least. DONE. and not hanging over my head. must concentrate. can't quite formulate the fallacy i am seeing here. there is one, but i can't describe it accurately. needs work. something like, beauty = truth, but truth is hard and beauty or beautifying is easy, and so representations of beauty can't be representations of truth? aligning beauty with facility and then turning it around to say that beauty therefore can't be truth, if truth means really looking and really working at it? so that's obviously wrong. and the other part of it is that we are conditioned by narratives, and so portrayals of an idealised world habituates us to idealised beauty, and we are more likely to become colder or at least prejudiced against the not-beautiful. but scarry herself says that's not justified, it suggests we're not capable of acts of generous looking and that we are distracted by beauty and surfaces from justice. you know this has something to do with my fairy tales paper, and two dimensional worlds. the fairy tale is an extreme genre, which is why it could so easily lend itself to structuralist readings, and also so often (unfairly) subjected to attacks from social critics and feminists and whatever else. that was digressing. what else. oh. and i suppose this one comes out of that commonplace that what is beautiful inspires love and also drives one towards virtue. and so the argument against that is that, oh but we love people and things that are familiar to us through human sympathy, and they aren't ideally beautiful and we recognise that, so our loving them proves that the perception of the beautiful isn't necessary to inspire love. that is wrong too, that just means that sympathy enables us to see as beautiful, and the fact that our sympathy makes us see as beautiful might still (or might not) prove that love is a two-step process, like ovidian paradigms of love beginning with visus. but then i suppose that can be countered too. hm. this is mostly tosh. nevermind. let's just cut and paste and see where this thinking aloud fits into the paper. onward but hopefully not downward.