I had almost forgotten Anne Carson, now 76, for two reasons. First, I am more of a prose reader than verse. Second, I have read only one of her books, Men in the Off Hours, which was published some 25 years ago and which I happened to read around 20 years ago.

Had it not been for an article she had written two years ago in The London Review of Books (LRB) about her being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, I wouldn’t have thought to search for Men in the Off Hours and re-read it.

There are several things that are famous and striking about Carson, the most important being her obsession with Greek philosophy. Then there is a sense of nostalgia and longing for people you’ve lost. Men in the Off Hours has an appendix in which she talks about losing her mother who was the person, as far as I remember, she loved the most.

Before I return to Men in the Off Hours – the only book by her that I have read cover to cover (though I also attempted to read Autobiography of Red) – I must state that one thing I found remarkable is her views on her handwriting after contracting Parkinson’s.

In LRB, she wrote:

When I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a symptom particularly mortifying to me was that my handwriting disintegrated. I used to take pleasure in writing in notebooks, shelves of them, day after day, year after year. Now the upright strokes bend or break or go in all directions, vowels shrink to blobs, slant loses its smooth smart angle, it all looks embarrassing. I scrub out whole paragraphs in shame.

Carson then goes on to rub it in:

Hard to describe or explain the shame of bad handwriting. Bad handwriting is ugly. Also it is inauthentic. In the sense it is not you.

For people like me – who don’t have to wait till we contract a debilitating disease to have bad handwriting – it was a revelation, almost a catharsis, because I have never been able to describe the shame of being invariably compared with siblings and friends for offensively illegible handwriting. But then Carson describes it effortlessly in a way a person with bad handwriting would immediately understand: I have always felt that my handwriting is not me!

How pompous I was to pretend that I was proud of my ugly handwriting!

I owe Carson more than my gratitude.

Those who have read all her works may look at her differently, maybe with a greater sense of admiration. As for me, rereading Men in the Off Hours takes me directly to two or three aspects, including her “Appendix to Ordinary Time” about her mother who passed away as she wrote it.

But the first one in this work, a mix of prose and verse, is about time. Carson uses Thucydides and Virginia Woolf, two people separated by several centuries, to teach us about time. “How people tell time is an intimate and local fact about them,” she writes after discussing a passage by Thucydides that talks about the local time zones of Argos, Sparta and Athens. In this she refers to Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, about the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens.

This is the passage from Thucydides – who often said that he recorded events of the war in the order of their occurrence, summer by summer and winter by winter – that she uses to explain time:

The thirty years’ truce which had been concluded after the capture of Euboea remained unbroken for 14 years; but in the 15th year, when Chrysis was in the 48th year of her priesthood at Argos, and Ainesias was ephor at Sparta, and Pythodoros had still four months to serve as archon at Athens, in the 16th month after the battle of Potidaea, at the opening of spring, some Thebans, a little more than 300 in number, entered under arms into Plataea about the first watch of the night.…

Time in this case is specific to each region.

Carson then brings up “The Mark on the Wall”, Virginia Woolf’s first short story, published in 1917. Carson writes, “She too begins with chronology. But she does not, like Thucydides, rise above ordinary time to a high point and look down on other people, other people’s reckonings. She stays in her own time.”

She also exclaims about Woolf’s metaphors – for instance, “with one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race horse,” to describe the rapidity of life.

Also memorable in the book is a verse titled “Shadowboxer” in which Carson talks about Longinus, the soldier who “put a spear through Christ’s side on the cross (and by some accounts broke his legs)”. The man could no longer sleep, it is said, and then Carson goes on to use the power of verse inspired by shadowboxing:

Was a body’s carbon not simply carbon.
Jab hook jab
Slight shift and we catch him in a moment
of expansion and catastrophe,
white arms sporting strangely in a void.
Uppercut jab jab hook jab.
Don’t want to bore you,
my troubles jab.
Jab.
Jab.
Punch hook. Jab.
Was a face not all stille as dew in Aprille.
Hook. Jab. Jab.

Carson’s winning the Nobel Prize is a fine reminder for me to read more of her work and get to know her as an essayist and a classicist, too.