Trousered Ape

An exercise in presumption.

Monday, July 06, 2026

State of the Ape LII

Your prayers for us are, as always, appreciated.

Sorry that this update is a little late. It’s entirely my own fault; once I miss a deadline (in this case, 07/02), and it’s not imperative that I carry out a task, it can be delayed indefinitely.

Anyway, I had my blood work last Thursday and the results were (drum roll): white blood cells: normal; lymphocytes: normal; PSA: down again, to 0.532.

I picked up the pace on Edwina 3 and have made good progress.

Bypassing the clerihews and picture this month to regale anyone out there who’s a writer with a couple of passages from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, in which she not only hits the nail on the head, but drives it through the wood, across the room, out the window, and deep into an oak tree a hundred yards distant:

For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and table set beneath a leaky roof—for he has not much to lose, after all—the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maid- servants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme. The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.

And a few pages later:

He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged…were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple…and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

Posted by Bob the Ape 10:53 PM