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I recently read Peter Abelard's Historia Calamitatum, which I was interested in because of his notorious incident with Heloise; theoretically, he sets out to give a short account of the hardships of his life for the supposed edification of his reader. In reality, however, the thing is so melodramatic that roughly half the reviews on Goodreads give it five stars for sheer self-important comedy. You know it's going to be good when this is one of the opening sentences:
This I do so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are in truth nought, or at the most but of small account, and so shall you come to bear them more easily.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that he was a glass-half-empty kind of guy.
Anyway, what made me really giggle was a passage that came later on, when he describes the unmitigated joy of presiding over a congregation monastery.
No one, methinks, could fail to understand how persistently that undisciplined body of monks, the direction of which I had thus undertaken, tortured my heart day and night, or how constantly I was compelled to think of the danger alike to my body and to my soul. I held it for certain that if I should try to force them to live according to the principles they had themselves professed, I should not survive.
Those Mondays are just killers.
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