Septimus, what is carnal embrace?

Engrossed in all the drama and minutia of moving, I have started two books, one I will certainly never finish as it is now propping up my bed on the slanted yet charming pre-war floor of my new apartment. The other I am enjoying partially because it is good on its own merits and partially because it doesn't require much of my brain, which is great since I don't have a lot to give right now. I can't focus on anything, my mind wanders back to thoughts like, "I live in New York now" and "It's cold" and "Whyyyy didn't I notice how much this floor slants when they were showing me the apartment?"

Times like now, it's nice to return to an old friend and I have spent my Columbus Day, when not being awkwardly flirted with by the sketchy dude installing my air conditioner, re-reading Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Lovely. I am somehow ready to re-engage with the world and ask questions of it, though none will ever be as eloquently phrased as Stoppard's. Reading Stoppard is almost depressing; he makes the most complicated issues of life seem so simple and he phrases it so beautifully that you have the urge to write his quotes on every blank piece of paper you have and to always be reminded that no, this is what love is, this is what beauty is, this is what life is.

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of ARchimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?