Christ is risen!

How odd. In any case, all responsibility for the image below is mine. Apologies.

Impale a Pike 

How to Deal with Fish

Dispatch all Shads
With an adze
But for Haddock
Employ a mattock.
Impale a Pike
Upon a spike
(Like a shrike.)
Beat your Perch
With rods of birch;
For Tench,
A wrench.
The Muskellunge
Must be well wrung.
The common Bream
Is drowned in cream.
Whiting
Wants biting.
Stab Crucian Carp
With anything sharp.
But only a lout
Would harm a Trout

--Adapted from various folk ballads and lore by G. W. Sleevesworth, O.F.M.

I see your patristics and raise you.

I am not terrifically serious about starting a "who can find the most writings of the Fathers of the Church online" contest. It is, however, a lot better than "words that start with vowels".

In truth I think opera, or falconry, or Greek poetry, or philosophy, or barnacles, or martial arts all to be worthy of a little obsession. Certainly they all reward it in precisely the manner you suggest. It's the niggling collection of crossroad gossip that's really worrisome--my own most prominent demon of which is encountered in the form of the Roguelike Game. I also recall a conversation we had while slinging, about the terrifying nearness of becoming connoisseurs of aerodynamic rocks....

But the great truths and disciplines illuminate not only themselves, but the source and method of knowledge, as you say. It's not just that one learns how to move from martial arts, but also that from moving, one learns the art.

I shall certainly miss your posts, but I do understand the apathy towards blogging. I've got a bit of it myself these days. My recent promotion at work has given me a number of new procedures (I feel exactly like I did in second grade, when I cheated on an art test and the teacher called on me first for the rest of the year, thinking that I knew what was going on) and... modes of being, I guess... to learn, which has made me less interested in (for example) tracking down articles about the Mount Mihara suicides. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre, c'est le pomme de terre.

Heavens, my first paragraph reads Dadaist back to me, now that I look it over. That'll put marzipan in your pie-plate, bingo!

I can't exit on that last note, though. Here's a nice online collection of patristic writings, if anyone's interested. I quite like St. Basil the Great's Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature.

Yes, yes, Odious. I am of course the last person to deny that grand opera is a very dangerous habit indeed. But there are many worse: I could wind up as, say, a falconer married to an orchid grower, and attain really exalted heights of penurious insanity, a slave to organisms more imperious and seductive than any spear-wielding soprano. Or, on the other hand, I could join the Japanese Anne of Green Gables cult, and be a slave to... I really can't fathom what. Given my obsessive personality, I'm thankful I got off with something as easy as opera.

The problem is, of course, that any fascination worth having at all tends to reward deep involvement. History, geology, astronomy, biology, music (especially Wagner), Icelandic (and other) literature, Eastern Orthodoxy, all such friendships blossom sportive and run wild once the first seed has infiltrated. A branch of knowledge you once thought you could hold in your hand and admire as a fine but small adornment to the world, you now see broad beyond fathoming, permeating the world everywhere you look. Every minute of continued study rewards you with further unveilings; the impossibly strange becomes familiar and the familiar so wonderful you can scarcely remember how it looked on first acquaintance. Certainly such passions endanger your relationship with other realms of reality, and can even imperil the necessities of life (ahem, falconers!). But these subjects don't bloom in any other way, don't fully reward balanced, sober, non-obsessive study. If your intellectual passions aren't bearing such dangerous fruits, consider well that you may be wasting your time.

All this is apropos, I guess, in that my own deep engagement with one of the above-named fields has, to be honest, left me with very little interest in blogging. I'm sorry, readers, and I especially hope Odious will forgive me. But I just don't miss it. You haven't heard the last of me; I'm definitely not vowing never to post again. If I'm inspired to write a post then I'll write it. But it may not be very often.

Speaking of Pre-Raphaelites, here's a page with Dante Gabriel Rossetti's doodles. I am particularly fond of "Economies Éléphantines", which is currently here at the Portland Art Museum. I would link directly to this charming pachyderm, but the page seems to lack the desired image.

William Holman Hunt
Was a religious chap.
His painting of a goat in the Holy Land
Is considered grand.

A quick wine review: the Siskiyou Vineyards 2000 Pinot Noir.

We picked up this wine on a whim, and are pleased to have done so. A deep nose of red and black cherry as well as plum. In the mouth, lovely, lovely oak and spice, though a bit too much fruit for my taste, and a hint of tobacco and leather. The finish is long and long on the palate and the sides of the tongue. It feels to me like it needs another year in the bottle, and could be laid up for five with great success, but we won't know until 2010, will we? Quite full-bodied, especially for a Pinot, and able to punch above its weight, so to speak, against a number of red meat dishes. Flank steak, yes please!

I should be much obliged in any reader might suggest a tune to which this poem of Anacreon's might be sung. Something rousing, and preferably without political connotations.

When Neil Gaiman cares to, he can write an excellent short story. I note that "Rache" also calls himself "Sigerson", which of course is from The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death, by Mr. Daniel Pinkwater, and references the greatest detective in the world (and an accomplished avocado amateur), Osgood Sigerson. The Snarkout Boys also contains a passage some of us (and I include myself in this number) might do well to heed:

Everybody ate in silence until the Bullfrog Root Beer was served. Then the conversation at the table got started. Aunt Terwilliger began making a sort of speech about grand opera. She was against it. Later, Rat told us that her aunt had just about every opera recording ever made. Her aunt spent hours in her bedroom listening to them, but all the rest of her time was spent arguing that people shouldn't listen to operas, and, above all, they shouldn't go to see them performed. Rat said that Aunt Terwilliger makes regular appearances in Blueberry Park, where she tries to convince people to live their lives opera-free. She feels that operas take up too much time. Also, she has an idea that people who like opera will become unrealistic, and not take their everyday lives seriously. Most of all, she believes that operas are habit-forming, and once a person starts listening to them, it's hard to stop, and one tends to listen to more and more operas until one's life is ruined.

Aunt Terwilliger has pamphlets printed up that she hands out. Her most popular one is called "Grand Opera: an Invention of the Devil."

I can't be the only one who went through age fourteen with an enormous crush on Rat, can I?

Anatomy of a Political Post

The Title

Your Title should be memorable and humorous, and by "humorous" I mean contain a simplistic, humorless pun. For example, if you were discussing Canadian anti-trust reform, you'd want to "liven things up" by titling your post, "A Hole Lot of Trouble for Tim Horton's". You might even italicize hole, since you can never drive your point home too firmly! Notice how this Title fulfills the dictionary definition of a "joke" without the formal quality of funniness. Funniness, you see, might distract from your Vital Points.

The Body

The Body of your post is where you'll bring up those Vital Points, but first we need to introduce the reader to our subject. Your Opening Paragraph should not only give the reader the facts about the issue, but also establish the "slant" of your blog. The "slant" is the political perspective from which you address all issues. All issues. Without fail. "Slant" is why people come to your blog, so if you're blogging about how great kittens are, and you're a conservative, be sure to add something about how liberals hate kittens because they hate freedom. Otherwise you will lose your audience.

Now, the Opening Paragraph. Insofar as the aforementioned ("insofar" and "aforementioned" are what we call "six-dollar words". Use them lots; it doesn't matter where) Canadian anti-trust reform has been in the news, the National Fitz-Spielbergo has run a brief article quoting Sen. David Ivannajob (D-South Dakota) as saying, "If this will help us get more delicious donuts, I'm all for it." A conservative blogger's Opening Paragraph might read like the following:

"So the Demoncrats are finally admitting what we all knew anyway. They're trying to turn the U. S. of A. into red Canada. They want to take away our guns, and give us what in exchange? Donuts. Donuts won't protect you and your loved ones from crack-head atheist earthshoe-wearing plant-eating PETA terrorists when they break into your home at three in the morning to steal our values, like freedom, which they hate."

See? You've given the reader all the information contained in the article, as well as political commentary!

The great advantage of the blogosphere is the number of voices that address each issue, as opposed to the monolithic structure of "Old Media". As the body of your post continues, your Vital Points should reflect your own, unique views and experiences. Steal most of them from newspapers, and the rest from bigger bloggers. Don't forget a "hat-tip"!

The other advantage of the blogosphere is links. Make sure that your article has lots of them, making it seem as though you researched the issue thoroughly. The links can be to any d-mn thing, as no one follows them. Ever. At least one should be "real", however, in case someone does call you on it, so that you can "*sigh*" and point them to it, as though that answered all their objections.

Wrong:

"Naturally, rBST must be banned from all planets and satellites in the inner solar system. Trans-Jovian space should have heavy restrictions on this deadliest of chemicals, far more potent than heroin or depleted uranium when mainlined."

Right:

"Naturally, rBST must be banned from all planets and satellites in the inner solar system. Trans-Jovian space should have heavy restrictions on this deadliest of chemicals, far more potent than heroin or depleted uranium when mainlined."

As you continue writing, you'll find that you have some ideas that just don't fit into this post. No problem! One sentence paragraphs make even the dumbest, more irrelevant nonsense seem profound:

"...thus demonstrating the inherent flaws in the free-market system. The evidence is simply too weighty to ignore.

Everyone should have to wear see-through pants, so we can check if they're wearing underwear or not.

Socialists, marginalized in our classist, anti-transgressive society, have no choice but to invade Iceland and establish..."

Note how, after the one sentence paragraph (or "OSP"), the main argument was picked up as though nothing had happened. This is the blogging equivalent of picking your nose while talking to someone, and has the same distrating effect, confounding your opponent! For extra points, follow an "OSP" with several others, and get a reputation as a deep, heart-felt writer. Once again, the "OSPs" don't need to connect to each other or anything else.

"...a neo-Trotskyite utopia. Freedom can only bloom when watered by the blood of a thousand capitalist blondes.

I like Ikea.

Why can't people see? Why?

Sometimes I think discussing politics online is better than smelling pretty.

I could really go for a handful of Splenda packets right now.

Why? WHY?"

When you've run out of ad hominem attacks and slurs, you'll want to wrap this post up. You haven't got all day, after all! Unless, like many bloggers, you do, in which case, hey, go for it. For those of us with lives, it's time for our Conclusion, beginning with the Concluding Paragraph.

The Conclusion

The Concluding Paragraph is actually mis-named, and we'll get to why in a moment. Meanwhile, know that the Concluding Paragraph should summarize your argument as succinctly as possible, so that lazy people can skip to the end for their political affirmation.

"In conclusion, donuts are good, but Celine Dion should go back where she came from."

Or:

"To sum up, the obvious solution is to have all home-schooled children watched twenty-four hours a day by FBI agents through cameras hooked up to the Inter Nets. Only this way will there truly be No Child Left Behind."

With your Concluding Paragraph done, it's time for the real Concluding Paragraph. Just when everybody thought you were done, you get in one last zinger!

"...back where she came from.

They can send all the bacon they want, though."

Zing! Or:

"... will there truly be No Child Left Behind.

But I guess low taxes are more important to some people than the lives of our children."

Ka-POW, baby! Or:

"...radical opposition to bio-technological advances is inherently self-defeating.

Heh."

FLAWLESS VICTORY!

A nice touch is to add an "Additional Reading" section at the end of you post. This is a list of links purporting to pertain (that's twelve dollars right there!) to the matter of your post. As with links within the post proper, these links need have no connection to anything at all. Why not start with Homestar Runner?

In conclusion, good luck.

All of Calvin and Hobbes is available online.

Via Second Breakfast.

You can't see me, but I'm doing the Happy Hamster Hop.

Excellent post on the future of sumo at Mutant Frog.

For some time I followed sumo, tracking its champions and watching what few bouts I could. It was my secret ambition to become a sumo wrestler (and those of you who know my frame will laugh mockingly). I even--and in my defense, I was very young, and had somewhat confused ideas about the sport, equating it on some level with professional wrestling--had a pseudonym and costume picked out. The first should tell you something of the second; I was to be Usagi.

The most irritating website in the world. It's as though a million web-browsers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I'd like to stop linking Eurekalert, but I've been away, and they just keep pushing my buttons, as shown by this bit on hobbit brainpower.

"I thought the Homo floresiensis brain would look like a chimp's," Falk said. "I was wrong. There were fancier things on LB1's brain."

The slow dance of galaxies is slower than we thought.

Via ditto.

"It was just a joke! You mean those d-mn research assistants actually looked?"

Researchers find three major beetle groups coming up one testicle short

BERKELEY – A surprisingly large number of beetles are missing one of their testes, the male gonads of insects. As far as the researchers who discovered this can tell, the insects are not in any way bothered or impaired by this absence.

The discovery is striking because most animals are bilaterally symmetrical, which means the left and right sides of the body roughly mirror each other. This bilateralism extends to many internal organs, although some systems, such as the human heart and liver, develop or are positioned asymmetrically.

There are pictures.

Via Eurekalert.

Octopi indeed:

The Aquarium had an octopus expert, Roland Anderson, answering questions, so I soon asked him the one that has been bothering me. Among mammals and birds, the smartest are social, long lived, and have few children. Octopuses may be the smartest invertebrate, and they are asocial, short lived, and have many children. (If I caught one of the talks right, Sappho will be looking forward to somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 blessed events.) So, my question was: Why are octopuses so smart? Part of the answer is that they are not terribly smart, perhaps as smart as a rat, rather than a crow or monkey. For the rest, no one really seems to know, though some think that octopuses may have traded a shell for smarts millons of years ago.

The nice thing about evolution is that, as the old joke goes, we don't have to outrun the bear, we just have to outrun you. With "the bear" being perfection and "you" being the next species over, if that wasn't clear. To people who ask, Why this way and not another, the answer is usually, Well, then we'd be [species X], which does do things that way. It's just got to work; it doesn't have to be pretty.

Via the incomparable Natalie Solent.

Everything that the Romancer Who Awakens the World has written falls within the bounds of plausibility except the episode in which the young man buys a father, which does seem a trifle fantastic. When readers get to that point, they will think they have discovered a flaw in his writing and will apply their harshest critical standards. However, when they read on and see that the pair were originally father and son and that the adoption was "all Heaven's doing," they will find it quite normal and not in the least implausible. From this example we can see that writing well is like being a good man and doing good deeds; first you must surprise people, then tempt them to criticize you; and finally, when their suspicions have gathered and their resentment is on the rise, you suddenly reveal all the good things that accrue to your hero and convince them that it takes patient effort to be a good man and do good deeds, after which they will be loud in their praise. Grasp this point and you will know how to write--and also how to read.

--Li Yu, discussing his own work.

HeLa cells

Henrietta's cells were, and still are, some of the strongest cells known to science--they reproduce an entire generation every 24 hours. "If allowed to grow uninhibited," Howard Jones and his Hopkins colleagues said in 1971, "[HeLa cells] would have taken over the world by this time." This strength provided a research workhorse to irradiate, poison, and manipulate without inflicting harm; but it also meant research labs were only big enough for one culture: HeLa.

Though it took three decades for the Geys to succeed with their efforts to create a human cell line, after their success with HeLa, culturing cells became suspiciously easy. Researchers cultivated tissue samples from their own bodies and the bodies of their families and patients. Most grew successfully. Sure, the samples struggled during the first few weeks, or even months, in culture, but then, suddenly, they flourished. Samples blossomed into full-blown healthy cell lines with the strength of, well, the HeLa cell.

In 1974, a researcher by the name of Walter Nelson-Rees started what everyone called a nasty rumor: HeLa cells, he claimed, had infiltrated the world's stock of cell cultures. No one wanted to believe him. For almost three decades researchers had done complex experiments on what they thought were breast cells, prostate cells, or placental cells, and suddenly, rumor had it they'd been working with HeLa cells all along. To believe this would be to believe that years of work and millions of dollars had, in essence, been wasted.

We have Henrietta Lacks to thank for any number of treatments, including the polio vaccine. Her cancer became our cures.

No, seriously, the question is, do boundaries imply an unbounded?

Promoted at work. Dealing. Baksun!

Okay, I'm game:

"Shaaaaa!" (Seven Samurai) (Not Wayne's World, d-mmit!)

"Look at the size of that thing!" (Star Wars, A New Hope)

"It doesn't matter to be drunken or not." (Deadly China Hero)

"This day we fight!" (Return of the King)

"So I got that going for me. Which is good." (Caddyshack)

Tornadic thunderstorm in White Sands.

One of the least successful trips of my life ended (unplanned and unsought) in White Sands. A bit of weather like this would only have been icing on the cake. Think car trouble, and a plan to propose to my girlfriend that gang'd far a-gley.

I meant to blog this discovery some time ago, and I'm sure you've all seen it by now, but cheers! for the possibilty of a Martian Sea.

Decent lecture on global warming by Mr. Crichton. Quibbles to follow.

The evidence suggests to me that global warming is occurring and has a man-made (the word "anthropogenic" is a abomination) component. There remain two questions: what effect will it have on the weather, and what should we do about it?

The first seems to me unpleasantly difficult to answer with any certainty, but I don't like messing with complex systems. Safety first when you're playing God, that's my motto.

What to do about it? Well, there I have an answer, but nobody likes it. Go nuclear! Let's get ourselves some of those nifty pebble-bed reactors and bring our energy production our of the Stone Age. We've been burning things for power since we first got thumbs. Let's advance a little, shall we?

This is not a popular stance. It falls smack into NIMBY trouble, and the word "nuclear" is enough to freak some people out. But no other source is adaptable enough for our current energy demands, and I see few signs of the world embracing a pastoral-romantical lifestyle. There is absolute a role for solar and wind power, as well as hydro-electric, in our lives. But I have yet to have it demonstrated that such sources can be anything more than augments to a more reliable one. Fusion? Call me when it's working.

Quibble two? Galileo's persecution is in fact the perfect example of Mr. Crichton's complaint. It was the Aristotelians of the time, as well as the men Galileo had ridiculed, who brought the Church's wrath on him; and that wrath fell due not only to concerns of heresy, but also the absence of decent evidence for Galileo's hypothesis. The Scientific American is acting not as the Church acted when confronted with Galileo's proofs, but even as scientists of the time reacted.

Via Naginata.

I believe we have beaten Mr. Barry to the latest in "snake found in toilet" stories.

Via Drudge.

But seriously, a little six footer? C'mon. The only way that could really hurt you is if Thulsa Doom shot it at you like an arrow. Although he would need one of those Yanomamo bows.

Images of Titan. But not from Huygens:

Several of the world's large ground-based telescopes were also active during this exciting event, observing Titan before and near the Huygens encounter, within the framework of a dedicated campaign coordinated by the members of the Huygens Project Scientist Team. Indeed, large astronomical telescopes with state-of-the art adaptive optics systems allow scientists to image Titan's disc in quite some detail. Moreover, ground-based observations are not restricted to the limited period of the fly-by of Cassini and landing of Huygens. They hence complement ideally the data gathered by this NASA/ESA mission, further optimising the overall scientific return

Via Eurekalert.

UPDATE: Ah, the things I don't know:

Titan is tidally-locked to Saturn, and hence always presents the same face towards the planet. To image all sides of Titan (from the Earth) therefore requires observations during almost one entire orbital period, 16 days. The trailing hemisphere is the one we see when Titan moves away from us in its course around Saturn. The leading hemisphere is the one on the other side.

Cool.

Lust.

Happy birthday to Georg Friederich Händel, in whom the world gained a great musician this day 1685 A.D. Moreover, the world avoided one more lawyer when Händel's father allowed him to study music.

How to Destroy the World.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.

This is not a guide for wusses whose aim is merely to wipe out humanity. I can in no way guarantee the complete extinction of the human race via any of these methods, real or imaginary. Humanity is wily and resourceful, and many of the methods outlined below will take many years to even become available, let alone implement, by which time mankind may well have spread to other planets; indeed, other star systems. If total human genocide is your ultimate goal, you are reading the wrong document. There are far more efficient ways of doing this, many which are available and feasible RIGHT NOW. Nor is this a guide for those wanting to annihilate everything from single-celled life upwards, render Earth uninhabitable or simply conquer it. These are trivial goals in comparison.

This is a guide for those who do not want the Earth to be there anymore.

At least two of the methods made me want to write long posts about their impossibility, but that's exactly what makes this sort of thing so enjoyable: sitting around in one's lair, surrounded by like-minded maniacs, with everybody trying to prove that their way's best. Minions! Another Orange Crush!

I got it from Science Fiction Blog, who in turn got it from Electrolite.

Over the Rhine is playing Portland and Eugene. Since they seem to have planned past tours with the desire to avoid me as completely as possible, this is a rather nice development.

I wish I had the voice of Homer
To sing of rectal carcinoma,
Which kills a lot more chaps, in fact,
Than were bumped off when Troy was sacked.
Yet, thanks to modern surgeons' skills,
It can be killed before it kills
Upon a scientific basis
In nineteen out of twenty cases.
I noticed I was passing blood
(Only a few drops, not a flood).
So pausing on my homeward way
From Tallahassee to Bombay
I asked a doctor, now my friend,
To peer into my hinder end,
To prove or disprove the rumour
That I had a malignant tumour.
They pumped in BaSO4
Till I could really stand no more,
And, when sufficient had been pressed in,
They photographed my large intestine.
In order to decide the issue
They next scraped out some bits of tissue.
(Before they did so, some good pal
Had knocked me out with pentothal,
Whose action is extremely quick,
And does not leave me feeling sick.)
The microscope returned the answer
That I had certainly got cancer.
So I was wheeled into the theatre
Where holes were made to make me better.
One set is in my perineum
Where I can feel, but can't yet see 'em.
Another made me like a kipper
Or female prey of Jack the Ripper.
Through this incision, I don't doubt,
The neoplasm was taken out,
Along with colon, and lymph nodes
Where cancer cells might find abodes.
A third much smaller hole is meant
To function as a ventral vent:
So now I am like two-faced Janus
The only* god who sees his anus.
(*In India there are several more
With extra faces, up to four,
But both in Brahma and in Shiva
I own myself an unbeliever.)
I'll swear, without the risk of perjury,
It was a snappy bit of surgery.
My rectum is a serious loss to me,
But I've a very neat colostomy,
And hope, as soon as I am able,
To make it keep a fixed time-table.
So do not wait for aches and pains
To have a surgeon mend your drains;
If he says 'cancer' you're a dunce
Unless you have it out at once,
For if you wait it's sure to swell,
And may have progeny as well.
My final word, before I'm done,
Is 'Cancer can be rather fun.'
Thanks to the nurses and Nye Bevan
The NHS is quite like heaven
Provided one confronts the tumour
With a sufficient sense of humour.
I know that cancer often kills,
But so do cars and sleeping pills;
And it can hurt one till one sweats,
So can bad teeth and unpaid debts.
A spot of laughter, I am sure,
Often accelerates one's cure;
So let us patients do our bit
To help the surgeons make us fit.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

Who was a real bastard, by the way, but could turn out the doggerel. I see it illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Violence is a currency accepted by all mortal merchants!

--Topato

CephaliPod!

Your iPod's glaring whiteness is relaying signals back to the humans. Protect yourself from harmful rays in style with this hand-crafted hip cozy made of (possibly) organic felt.

Squamous...rugose...what more could I ask? And how great is that "(possibly)"?

Ganked sans peur et sans merci from Eve Tushnet.

Lucy's Sense of Snowe

As Kate has mentioned, I've been reading Villette, and finding it very odd. Part of the problem is that its companions on my nightstand are mostly Germans, which give an unfortunate contrast to anything written well. Reading translated German slowly begins to give one the false impression that anything incomprehensible is necessarily deep with meaning;¹, and contrariwise that anything one can enjoy is intellectually shallow, which Villette certainly is not.

But it is well written, and it is odd. For the first two or three chapters I was uncertain as to the identity of the main character. The narrator had a distinct voice, but Polly seemed to demand the reader's attention, as did young Graham. Polly shows up like a fairy-tale princess to the house; her father is ill, her mother dead, and she herself is "a neat, completely fashioned little figure, light, slight, and straight. Seated on my godmother's lap, she looked a mere doll; her neck, delicate as wax, her head of silky curls...."

A proper fairy-tale would have Lucy as its heroine. It is after all her godmother with whom she and Polly stay, and Lucy would therefore seem to have the rights to any bounty to be distributed by that time-honored agent of advancement. She refuses them. Later, she will refuse Graham himself, in a typically subtle, unacknowledged way. It is no accident that Lucy Snowe tells her story in the first person. She tells the reader as much as she pleases, which often pleases the reader rather less. We know nothing of Lucy's family, from start to finish. We are withheld information vital to our understanding of her actions, and even the ending is deliberately ambiguous. My wife continues to insist that the book ends happily; I am not as confident.

Lucy's relationships with others are, I think, all attempts to lessen the pain of their refusal to affect and be affected by her. She is desperate for someone who will take her seriously: consider not only her pleasure but her good; listen when she speaks and speak when she listens. When she cannot find such a person, she withdraws into loneliness.

The philosopher, we are told, is never lonesome. Socrates was noted not only for his ability to deal with all men as equals, but also for his long spells of silent thought, indifferent to his surroundings, presumably rapt in contemplation of the movement of the spheres.

He started wrestling with some problem or other about sunrise one morning, and stood there lost in thought, and when the answer wouldn't come he still stood there thinking and refused to give it up. Time went on, and by about midday the troops noticed what was happening, and naturally they were rather surprised and began telling each other how Socrates had been standing there thinking ever since daybreak....Well, he stood there till morning, and then at sunrise he said his prayers to the sun and went away.

Of course, Socrates has a constant companion in his daimon, which tells him what not to do. His method of inquiry, dialogue, requires this sort of doubled self, which apparently suffices for him. Indeed, "I think it better, my good friend, that my lyre should be discordant and out of tune, and any chorus I might train, and that the majority of mankind should disagree with and oppose me, rather than that I who am but one man should be out of tune with and contradict myself." (emphasis added, naturally). Harmony, of course, requires at least two notes, and Socrates, though one man, claims to have at least those two notes within himself. He is self-sufficient; within himself he finds a partner which allows him to set boundaries for himself--to define himself.

Lucy stands in stark challenge to this claim. She has no such company within her. Anything she finds within her is only herself, and therefore useless for the purpose of self-definition. Only through some outside interaction can she test the boundaries of her self and thereby discover and claim them. And only human interaction can accomplish this for her. The most harrowing passage in the book comes after Lucy is bereft of even the elemental company of Ginevra Fanshawe, Mme. Beck, and the other dim students and faculty of the school.

[T]he house was left quite empty, but for me, a servant, and a poor deformed and imbecile pupil, a sort of cretin whom her stepmother in a distant province would not allow to return home.

My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless! How vast and void seemed the desolate premises!... My spirits had long been sinking; now that the prop of employment was withdrawn, they went down fast. Even to look forward was not to hope: the dumb future spoke no comfort, offered no promise, gave no inducement to bear present evil in reliance on future good.

...

The cretin did not seem unhappy. I did my best to feed her well and keep her warm, and she asked only food and sunshine, or when that lacked, fire. Her weak faculties approved of inertion: her brain, her eyes, her ears, her heart slept content; they could not wake to work, so lethargy was their Paradise.

...

It was some relief when an aunt of the cretin, a kind old woman, came one day, and took away my strange, deformed companion. The hapless creature had been at times a heavy charge; I could not take her out beyond the garden, and I could not leave her a minute alone; for her poor mind, like her body, was warped: its propensity was to evil. A vague bent to mischief , an aimless malevolence made constant vigilance indispensable. As she very rarely spoke, and would sit for hours together moping and mowing and distorting her features with indescribable grimaces, it was more like being prisoned with some strange tameless animal, than associating with a human being. There were personal attentions to be rendered which required the nerve of a hospital nurse; my resolution was so tried, it sometimes fell dead-sick.

It has become common to speak of the wonders of nature, the joys of it, and to see divinity in its works. We forget what a world deprived of meaning and reason looks like--a speechless, mindless thing, twisting itself into new shapes, behind which is a dull malevolence. I am reminded of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, when, as the heroes pursue Sunday, they discuss their impressions of him. The fanatical secretary has just decribed pouring his heart out before him.

"Then, after a long silence, the Thing began to shake, and I thought it was shaken by some secret malady. It shook like a loathsome and living jelly. It reminded me of everything I had ever read about the base bodies that are the origin of life--the deep sea lumps and protoplasm. It seemed like the final form of matter, the most shapeless and most shameful.... And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me."

The sensible Inspector Radcliffe insists that Sunday's true creepiness lies elsewhere: he is absent-minded. "Now, absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man.... [H]ow do you bear an absent-minded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went throught wild forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger?" And Chesterton is echoing, like Lucy, the unanswerable voice which answered Job.

Behold, Behemoth
which I made as I made you;
he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins,
and the power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar;
the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze,
his limbs like bars of iron.

He is the first of the works of God;
let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield food for him
where all the wild beasts play.
Under the lotus plants he lies,
in the covert of the reeds and in the marsh.
For his shade the lotus trees cover him;
the willows of the brook surround him.
Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened;
he is confident though Jordan rushes against him.
Can one take him with hooks,
or pierce his nose with a snare?

This incomprehensible world is what is left to Lucy after the withdrawal of all speaking persons from her. It is notable that she faces the world in its appalling muteness, rather than retreating into a comfortable romanticism. Throughout the book we see this quality in her: she cannot be satisfied by less than true contact. Even when such contact is without any reason, without the element of humanity she longs for, she does not supply it herself. However, at the end of her vacation, the strain of this delirium drives her into what stands, for her, as the most abhorrent of creeds, and she enters into a Catholic church. "Any solemn rite, any spectacle of sincere worship, any opening for appeal to God was as welcome to me then as bread to one in extremity of want." This attitude mixes poorly with the amount of venom which is poured over Catholicism throughout the rest of the book. Lucy is at the last unable to bear this companionless world, and succumbs to seeking both divine and human company where she presumes neither is to be found. That the priest is revealed as the agent of her later distress drives home this point: never in falseness can one find relief (and seldom if ever in truth). Lucy leaves the chruch and collapses.

She awakes in a sort of dream: she has returned to the rooms of her youth, in her godmother's home. Every detail is just as it was years ago.

(More when I have time.)

Les Miserables the 2D fighting game. I play as Eponine, but Cosette will drop you so fast your beret will spin.

Via Mutant Frog.

UPDATE: As Enjorlas I managed to--I have no idea how--drop a barricade on my opponent and then climb onto it in triumph. Take that, forces of oppression!