The Marble Window

[bellatrys]

--With apologies to Oscar Wilde, Guy de Maupassant, and Franz Kafka.*

'Twas dashed off carefully & thoughtfully written in response to a specific online whiner, but one that was but instancing of a common trope, which itself is but a narrow version of a general syndrome, and thus may be applied elswhere as applicable...

Flames like small candles

Comments

[fledgist]

Definitely a bit of Eddison in there. 'Durst' by the way, is a second person verb, and thus shouldn't go with a third person pronoun.

Actually, I'm taking this opportunity to say that I got Saberhagen's Love Conquers All and it is pretty awful. I'm about half-way through it and don't feel like continuing (at least not now). The way he inverts values is truly, truly mindless, though the idea of nudity as fundamentally conservative(as a reaction to the constant emphasis on exagerrated sexual organs) does show originality.

Well, Macaulay uses "durst" with "they"

[bellatrys]

and the old rhyme about the unconquerable snail has it with third person singular, which is where I first encountered it myself. I'm just going with centuries of linguistic precedent, here.

I got Saberhagen's Love Conquers All and it is pretty awful.

Ouch, not surprised but sorry it's not even got the entertainment value. Suffering for the truth is always unpleasant, but sometimes you can at least get a laugh out of it...

Re: Well, Macaulay uses "durst" with "they"

[fledgist]

Me, I'd have said 'they dare not' were I being Elizabethan, and thou shouldst not say me nay. For, though thou beest most fair and most wise, yet verily I can indite cod Elizabethan for hours at a time, and still be up betimes.

I will, at some time plough through it (although it is very predictable -- heroic wife who won't have an abortion, but will have the foetus transferred to an external container so that it can, eventually, be transplanted and born.

*g*

[bellatrys]

The thing about doing Consciously-Archaic-Feeling stuff is that it's like doing a forgery - the trick with forgeries (and I need to do a post about this, because it's a perfect metaphor for Illusion generally) is that they can't *be* authentic, they have to *feel* authentic instead. This is the problem with using "thee" too, b/c people nowdays tend to find it archaic and formal, and so if you use it correctly (ie as tu/du vs Vous/Sie) it comes off entirely the opposite of how you mean it, for 90% of your readers, or more. So it's always fluid. And then there's the balancing act of how much/which archaicisms to throw in, before your readers get tired of going to the dictionary and throw it at you instead - cough*Eddison*cough.

I will, at some time plough through it (although it is very predictable -- heroic wife who won't have an abortion, but will have the foetus transferred to an external container so that it can, eventually, be transplanted and born.This idea has come up a lot on blogs the past year, for some reason, as The