Flotsam and Jetsam
World Fantasy Con is just days away. Whoa, how did that happen?
A great scramble to get ready while dodging falling pianos and anvils.
Meantime, I'm rereading probably the most underrated great novel of the entire nineteenth century, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters..
For anyone who thinks that Victorian literature was a monolith designed to keep women second class citizens, I recommend this book, because Gaskell writes about the cost of females being kept ignorant of the fundamentals of life, but she does it with such delicacy that the book could be read aloud in families.
Here's a bit that follows a seventeen year old girl being reminded to think of others, and not herself, after she's been given a really rough emotional blow.
"It is difficult," (the young hero, Roger) went on, "but by-and-by you will be so much happier for it."
"No, I shan't," said Molly, shaking her head. "It will be very dull when I shall have killed myself, as it were, and live only in trying to do, and to be, as other people like. I don't see any end to it. I might as well never have lived."
[After a bit more, Roger tried again with the truisms of the time,] "Perhaps in ten years' time you will be looking back on this trial as a very light one--who knows?"
She says, "I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent."
A great scramble to get ready while dodging falling pianos and anvils.
Meantime, I'm rereading probably the most underrated great novel of the entire nineteenth century, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters..
For anyone who thinks that Victorian literature was a monolith designed to keep women second class citizens, I recommend this book, because Gaskell writes about the cost of females being kept ignorant of the fundamentals of life, but she does it with such delicacy that the book could be read aloud in families.
Here's a bit that follows a seventeen year old girl being reminded to think of others, and not herself, after she's been given a really rough emotional blow.
"It is difficult," (the young hero, Roger) went on, "but by-and-by you will be so much happier for it."
"No, I shan't," said Molly, shaking her head. "It will be very dull when I shall have killed myself, as it were, and live only in trying to do, and to be, as other people like. I don't see any end to it. I might as well never have lived."
[After a bit more, Roger tried again with the truisms of the time,] "Perhaps in ten years' time you will be looking back on this trial as a very light one--who knows?"
She says, "I daresay it seems foolish; perhaps all our earthly trials will appear foolish to us after a while; perhaps they seem so now to angels. But we are ourselves, you know, and this is now, not some time to come, a long, long way off. And we are not angels, to be comforted by seeing the ends for which everything is sent."