North Carolina: Reclining on couches in happiness, with companions pure, most beautiful of eye

So I am stranded in the south because the north is getting a lot of snow. It's plantation houses and biscuits here and I am staying at a renovated mansion that could be the setting of Kara Walker's nightmares. Or certain people's dream weddings. I spend days in the luxury and wallowness of a southern belle of a hundred years. They have prints of natives and ducks all over the walls. The silverware is quite exquisite.

Today, I ventured out into the world, and spent the better half of my time at a cafe working on my translations. I thought of Aschenbach. I contemplated on certain aspects of walking, picking up things and opening doors. A phenomenology, if you will. I bought a secondhand skirt from a very pretty boy, something out of a sad American road movie. He asked me the name of the author I gave a talk on. Then, responding to nature's call I entered a chinese. I bought fried rice, which in the hotel room turned out to be a good American portion that could feed a family of four. Walking down to my plantation residence I saw two dark SUV's, they had words painted with whitewash on them. Duke Fuck UNC. Duke > UNC, beautifully and academically economical. There were tents set up in the middle of the oxonianity of Duke, under the rain yesterday, people waiting to get tickets for the basketball game. I bought a Carolina t-shirt to commemorate the game, my groundedness and the phenomenology of the cafe (there was a guy with an Exeter College hoodie sitting behind me). Reclining on couches in happiness, with companions pure, most beautiful of eye.

Arendt, Snow, Railtracks

In preparation for a 'chance' meeting with a professor I read Arendt, having taken refuge in the carpet-floored inner-sanctum of my apartment which is the bedroom. My eye waters uncontrollably (I think the night cream seeped into it) and to the kitchen I go to pick a tissue. I see it snow as in fairy tales, in abundance, and the flakes are seeable only because of the light of the locomotive that is parked a few meters away from the window which covers the whole of the north facade of the apartment. The flakes fall down onto the railtracks, and the locomotive bides its time. It will be a white morning tomorrow.