explaining, unexplaining

There are 18th-century texts so packed with topical references and in-jokes that even now a researcher will occasionally trip across something random in an archive that goes beyond the existing scholarly apparatus to explain what the fuck they were actually talking about.

I’d forgotten this… accumulation of words till broader archaeology revealed it to me for the first time in forever. Re-reading it triggered enough worn synapses to recall the place and space in which it was written, but to explain it now to someone with no reason to recognise names or its absurdly insular context? It’s taking me long enough to explain it to myself— though I’m glad, at least, that the author was having fun.