Tilda you're balmy
My home page contains a paragraph pointing out ways in which I am adjectivally different from Tilda Swinton. (I am old enough to think of my home page as ~swinton which makes it a mightily amusing as well as informative paragraph, as well as diverting me to a History of the tilde and discovering that Wikipedia has more on the tilde than on Tilda). But actually we have more in common than surnames and the fact she left Cambridge the year I arrived. For Tilda and I share a balm:
She had, two years after Jarman's death, an attack of shingles. She diagnoses it now as a delayed case of grief. During her convalescence she read the works of several mathematicians, as well as Thomas a Kempis's fifteenth century meditation "Imitation of Christ" whilst sitting in a window seat in a London flat. She said that trying to understand those books was what got her through--that applying her emotional imagination to both the infinite and the concrete was a kind of balm.The New Yorker, 2002; thanks to Bill Casselman for the quote.
So there you are, D, it is not only your amusingly nerdy husband who unwinds with books like Polya and Szegö. I have a terrible feeling, though, that unlike me Tilda has got past problem 9, which is quite an achievement with shingles on a window seat. Window seats are a lovely romantic idea in principle, summoning ideas of Pre-Raphaelite maidens dreamily letting Ovid slip from slender too-pale fingers. But in practice I've never sat on one that was close to comfortable, even counting the one we had built once. I don't think Tilda was telling us quite the whole truth about that bit.
