Friday 26 June 2015

In Desert and Wilderness

I am just home from taking a pregnant young married lady and her husband around Edinburgh, and I see that the USA has done something or other about g*y m*rriage, which I am otherwise going to ignore because m*rriage is a permanent relationship, entered willingly and in freedom, by a m*n and a wom*n for the purpose of procreation and mutual support. It was such before the Mayflower reached Plymouth Harbour, and it will be such when Plymouth Harbour is washed into the sea.

Meanwhile I have embarked on a new Polish project, and it is to read W Pustyni i w puszczy  ("In desert and wilderness") by Henryk Sienkiewicz from cover to cover. As I am reading one page a day, that will take me about 250 days. The reason I am reading only one page a day as so not to feel overwhelmed by all the words I do not understand. When I come across a word I do not understand, I underscore it in pencil and continue reading. Then I look up the underscored words in my dictionary.

I started this grand project on 19th June, and I have read 8 whole pages. This means I am halfway through Rozdział (Chapter) 2. Hooray for me. In today's page, Mr Rawlinson, father of Nell, explains to Stanislaw Tarkowski, son of Mr R's best pal, explains the geopolitical situation of Sudan. (It is 1884, and they're all madly colonial, Mr T going engineering grunt work for the Brits.) In yesterday's page, Mr Rawlinson mentioned Khartoum and General Gordon in the present tense, so I have a terrible feeling that all will be very bad very soon.  Nell's French governess does not want to go on the two families' exciting trip to Medinet, and I cannot blame her.

Anyway, it's all very hard, so very crushing and healthy for my ego.

2 comments:

  1. I am very interested to see how this gy mrrge thing will play out during my lifetime (assuming, of course, that I live for another 60-odd years, which I suppose is quite an assumption.)

    A couple of years ago, the Australian government made a formal apology to mothers and children who were separated from each other due to what amounted to forced adoptions in the 1960s and 1970s. The man who wrote the apology speech now thinks that in the future the government will have to apologise to children and parents who are currently being separated due to surrogacy procedures. I mean, quite apart from anything else, we're just casually rewriting all these rules about parenthood and marriage with what appears to be little concern for what the wash-up will be in thirty (or even fifteen) years' time.

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  2. Dear Seraphic,
    this is great! For when you will have finished with this one, your Polish will be good enough to read Potop, which is the great story of the victory over the Svedes and the siege of Czenstochowa. And you will meet Pan Kmicic, who ist THE swashbuckling hero!

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