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I'm working on catching up on my reading list, after not touching it for a week or so again.
I just had a moment of realisation: people kept talking about "Gregorian New Year", and I was bemused, because I was like... was someone talking about the Julian dates for some reason or something? And then I realised that people were distinguishing it from other extant calendars.
Which led me to realise that to me, Gregorian/Julian is a paired set of distinguishing adjectives. Sort of like positive/negative, where one implies the other. (I'm pretty sure there's a term for this, but I'm tired and can't remember it.) The quality of Gregorianness is, in my head, in opposition to Julianity.
I was about to draw parallels with "eastern"ness, but that is tricky territory, because most people will default to "eastern" as the sort of "Oriental" image, which, it doesn't really map that way to me much. My mental map of "eastern" is to the largely Occidental and "Antipodean" eastern states. Of Australia.
Today, anyway.
All of these terms are, in a way, awesomely bad, because all of them define things relative to other things, and therefore will break depending on perspective, and also, how far is what?
I mean, to me, the East vs West thing - the boundary, to me, is largely marked around the Mediterranean - Delphi in particular, with its "centre of the known world" status in Classical Greek times. But at what point does East become West again? It's all so arbitrary.
I'm blethering. Never mind. And I have many, many tabs developing from trying to catch up on reading things.
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