LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
Michaelmas out this bitch, yo, and LC up in Lincoln’s crib. Weather is off the hook, frfr. Streets so muddy like Noah’s flood just got done, I ain’t even be shook if a Dino come roaring up at me lmao. Chimney smoke be hanging low like Snoop Drizzle in town and ash be falling like fuckin snow, no cap. Watching the dogs and horses getting about covered in filth like they be swimming in it. Shit is wild, fam, homies on foot got no rizz, they be slipping and sliding on mud just tryna get along down the street for reals, stepping in mud and it be stepping back on them like they only drip.
Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.
Yes, although I’m struck by some of the words, particularly this sense of “wonderful”.
And now I’m even more glad that it’s sunny out here right now and I can hear birds.
Sorta like how “awesome” and “terrible” in their current usage are very weak words.
A youth pastor and Cotton Mather could both say “God is awesome” and mean very different things.
Kind of, “It was very muddy in London” but nobody talks like this today, so it sounds very strange. I’m personally not a fan. I don’t think there’s a complete sentence anywhere in that passage.
Sentence fragments, capitalized and punctuated like fresh immigrants assimilating to their new mother.
Nabokov seemed to think that the fog was important. I guess it’s a novel about a legal case, and maybe the metaphor is the “fog” of legal confusion.
Nabokov? You mean that guy from The Police song?
Hey - don’t stand so close to me.
Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.
Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?
Sure—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century literature.
I also read the news about the same research article you did.
I was surprised how much I could understand, based on how much trouble people in the study had. Sounds like a wet miserable city our Lord Chancellor is in.
Also yes.
This is something we would have been asked to read and analyze in grade 8
Yes, but it’s really cumbersome to us foreigners.
No, because aphantasia. I love the turns of phrase, though.
Yes, but I spent a lot of my childhood reading things like Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, count of Monte cristo, Oliver twist, etc.
Understanding and being able to visualize are different things. Some people can’t visualize at all
I knew I have read it before somewhere.
Well, like every craft, skills develop over time. What was a blacksmith hundreds of years ago is now a CNC operator. Likewise, writing styles have evolved over time.
Yes, he has been a great storyteller, and his stories and characters stood the test of time, but his writing style did not.
yea and I don’t like how its written
