I'm getting a little queasy.

I handed in my Late Antiquity essay yesterday morning, and after a beer and a burger with some girls on my course, a long nap, and a couple hours' blissfully undisturbed reading of Middlemarch (I'm halfway through after four months -- maybe I'll finish it at about the same time as my dissertation?) I'm feeling utterly mentally stable.

I survived this week unscathed (well -- I should wait to see my essay mark before going that far), but some others I've been surrounded with haven't been so lucky. In fact, I've had more direct and indirect contact with blood and guts this month than I ever have.

First, Prudentius' martyrs. I've read some gory Latin in my day, but nothing to compare to this. It's conventional Christian wisdom that the glory of a martyr increases in direct proportion to his suffering, and in the Peristephanon, Prudentius does his best to prove the point.

Take, for example, the scalping of a little boy who precociously professes his faith in Per. 10:

comam cutemque verticis revulserat
a fronte tortor, nuda testa ut tegmine
cervicem adusque dehonestaret caput

The torturer pulled back the hair and skin from his brow,
so that the skull, laid bare without its covering
down to the neck, would dishonor the head. (Per. 10.761-3)

And then, later, his mother's reaction at his decapitation:

manusque tendebat sub ictu et sanguine,
venarum ut undam profluam manantium
et palpitantis oris exciperet globum:
excepit, et caro adplicavit pectori.

And she held out her hands under the blow and the blood,
so that she might catch the stream flowing from his dripping veins
and his head, with lips still breathing:
she caught, it, and pressed it dearly to her breast. (Per. 10.841-4)

Makes it a little hard to focus on the glory of God, doesn't it?

The gore has also been brought a little closer to home recently due to a freak accident here in Clifton. When Dee was here, he and I were walking down Park St. on the way to the train station one morning, not paying much attention to what was happening on the street, when suddenly, right in front of the post office, I stepped in a huge pool of human blood. Like, a good gallon or so of really thick, fresh stuff, of about ketchup thickness. I looked up in horror to find that we'd walked right through an accident scene, so new it hadn't been properly cordoned off, and there was a guy with his head cracked open being loaded into an ambulance right next to me.

Well, we didn't stop to rubberneck, and went on to the station. When we came back at the end of the day, you couldn't tell anything had happened. I didn't think much about the incident again until yesterday, when I picked up a copy of the student paper and found the headline Triangle Brain Damage Tragedy and a picture of a police officer standing outside the post office. The article made it clear that the accident was the one I'd walked through. Turns out stonework was being done on top of the building, and a brick fell 50 ft. and hit a chemistry Ph.D. student from Syria on the head. Someone noticed him lying there bloodied and called an ambulance, and he's been in the hospital unconscious ever since -- over two weeks now. If he ever wakes up he'll have severe brain damage, and he doesn't even have any family in the country.

Pretty intense stuff. Sorry to gross you all out. Future reports should be less gruesome. I've had enough blood and guts for a while.