Darles Chickens

I forgot to mention this earlier which is probably just as well. People tend to only focus on a single thought from a particular posting, although what there is to say about the fact I have (finally) finished reading A Tale of Two Cities, I sure don't know.

Already mentioned that I was enjoying it more than the other novels of his I read, possibly because it was more story and less explicit in social agenda. Despite the long gaps in my reading I still did enjoy it quite a bit. Dickens seems not able to resist stringing improbable connections throughout the tale so that at the end he shakes it out to reveal a small spiderwebbed world. At the end I think I would I felt most strongly for Sydney Carton (but he caught my interest immediately he was introduced). Also proud of (and sad for) Miss Pross. I disliked her when she was introduced and her character did not really change, I think, but a matter of perspective can do wonders for whose side one is on.

I do not know how accurate the portrayal of the French Revolution was but I had the impression that, in any case, he was setting the story in that period to make a point about the (then) present. The scenes in the last part of the story echoed so that I am sure other writers have taken inspiration from them.

Enough for now. Next up, Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel!

(no subject)

The Uncredible Hallq offers up an analogy - The Martian Invasion Fleet.

Rumble, Rumble, Thunder Grumble

I love stormy weather.

"This Land", Part 2

Whenever she visited the place she had made she did her best to add detail and impart a sense of life to it. Here, a depression; there, a hillock; now a meandering groove which might have been meant as a dried riverbed. The solid was made brown and just earthlike enough to be clear it was not. Much of it she turned green, so that now it did not look like grass rather than not like dirt. This was variety.

There still was no sky or any thing beyond her island. To look anywhere beyond this patch of solid was to be confronted by the raw absence of anything. This bothered her, more and more as time passed until finally it was like daggers stabbing into her brain and she could not bear to look up. So she fenced herself in with blue and dotted it with cotton-puff clouds, above and below.

Clouds below, they fascinated her enough that she wished to spend hours watching them, if only they were not so crude. She did her best to make them fluffy, to make them change and drift like clouds should. They came not a bit perfect, but far better than before, so she fixed up the clouds above too.

She lay on the brown solid, head down over the edge to admire her handiwork and found her perception abruptly shifted. All at once it was not the clouds moving but her island, carrying her along with it to unknown destinations. The unexpected sense of motion made her feel suddenly nauseous and afraid to fall. She had to scramble quickly inland and focus on something still to keep her lunch – though she had none to lose.

After a short while she recovered and began to felt quite proud of her work, and a little silly. “You have had this canvas with which you might have made anything,” she said to herself (for she was very much the sort of person who spoke to herself), “and all you have done is build for yourself your own little corner of mundanity. What a small mind you have! At least this bit of whimsy will go some way to make up for it.”

So for hours after she watched her island plow through the clouds and made herself a captain's hat to wear, which fluttered in the breeze when she remembered that it ought to.