Carson took Latin in high school because it was the alternative to
typing. Her Latin teacher was also conversant in ancient Greek, so
Carson took Greek lessons in her lunch hour. "Greek is one of those
things that, when you do it, you realise it's the best experience in the
world, there's no reason ever to stop. It's just some amazing
combination of the kind of puzzle-solving that goes into crosswords and
amazing literature. You think, well, they're nerds, they were born that
way. But they're not just nerds, they're all kinds of people who stumble
into this happy field of endeavour and stay there." To her parents'
alarm, she announced that she was going to pursue these two, entirely
impractical dead languages at university. "My father kept telling me to
get a marketable skill on the side. He suggested typing. He was worried
for some time. And then I got a job at Princeton and he sort of calmed
down."
If her study of Greek and Latin has affected her own
writing style, Carson suspects it is to be found in the way she makes
patterns between things. "There is something about the way that Greek
poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't
think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm
always trying to push towards in English. It's a kind of compacting of
metaphor, without a concern for making sense ... it's just on the edge
of sense and on the edge of the way language should operate."
The
danger with this, and with Carson's writing, is that it drifts into
whimsy or nonsense. "It does fall apart a lot. It gets just too weird
for anyone to care about reading, or else it gets diluted into a sort of
parody of itself. Intuition is the only way to keep on the line between
them. And also focusing back on to the first time the idea came into
your head has some kind of pristine conviction that it gradually loses."
Carson returns to the actual piece of paper on which she wrote down the
beginning of the idea, usually a coffee-stained back of an envelope.
"Because there's something almost magically convincing about that piece
of paper. The same words typed on a nice clean piece of paper wouldn't
have whatever it is - fidelity, to your original thought."
- Grauniad profile, 2006
descensus Averno facilis est