Wrote a scholar from the island that they kept from me
Having access this evening to a tableful of newspapers, I saw the front-page article in the Globe about the climatically imminent flooding of the Seaport and it was pretty much exactly like reading that water is wet. I still have difficulty regarding that neighborhood as a real part of Boston, not merely because of its glass-shelled gentrification but because it is even more obviously on loan from the sea than the rest of this flat gravel-fill town. As soon as there was sea-rise in the future, Boston was going to be under it, long before the governments and corporations of this world blew through the 1.5C deadline. I love the harborwalk and I have seen the harbor walking over it. Urban renewal was faster cash in the moment than streets that would not flood the next minute. I do not believe in the stupidest timeline because I was exposed too early to the folktale in which it could always be worse, but it is nonsensical and nightmarish to me that this is the one we are all trapped in. It is because the universe is an unjust place that so many in power are not found in the morning blue-lipped, salt-lunged, sea-strangled on land.
On the other hand, tonight I watched Hestia trot over to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch's new computer on which was still stuck the silver-paper bow of its early holiday present and pluck it in passing, after which she hunted it up and down the front hall with much batting and biting and singing the high, clear song to her prey which is usually reserved for socks. Decades after bouncing off all the George Eliot I tried after Silas Marner (1861), I seem to be embedded in Middlemarch (1872). It washed out my plans for the day which I then did little with, but I slept a generally assessed normal number of hours.
On the other hand, tonight I watched Hestia trot over to
spatch's new computer on which was still stuck the silver-paper bow of its early holiday present and pluck it in passing, after which she hunted it up and down the front hall with much batting and biting and singing the high, clear song to her prey which is usually reserved for socks. Decades after bouncing off all the George Eliot I tried after Silas Marner (1861), I seem to be embedded in Middlemarch (1872). It washed out my plans for the day which I then did little with, but I slept a generally assessed normal number of hours.
no subject
So noted! I must not have made it that far into Daniel Deronda. I might as well try it again.
Remind me which Goudge you like? I've never read her, and I'm curious.
The Valley of Song (1951) was my formative one and I still re-read it: its Anglicanism is mixed with fairy lore and classical myth to genuinely weird and numinous effect and its language is some of the most beautiful of any of her books for children or adults that I have read. I like Linnets and Valerians (1964) and do not dislike The Little White Horse (1946) even though it never made the same impression somehow. Of her adult novels, I have good memories of A City of Bells (1936) and The Dean's Watch (1960) and enjoyed more than not of Green Dolphin Country (1944), which thanks to a 1947 MGM film became the famous one of hers in the U.S. The White Witch (1958) disappointed me so much as a young reader by containing more romance than magic that I have never actually gotten around to trying it again. I anti-recommend The Heart of the Family (1953) and can really enjoy The Child from the Sea (1970) only as crackfic.
(I am so lacking in familiarity with Boston that I cannot comment on its geography, but as a denizen of San Francisco, I know all about land that's borrowed from the sea.)
(Understood!)