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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 11

Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet is the first of his novels about the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr Watson.  I turned to the physical centre of the book to find its change of direction, and came across a long paragraph describing a Mormon caravan of wagons, horses, walkers, and toddlers, all making their way towards the West of the great North American Continent.  The Mormons are a source of some major players in the story.

However, the novel has two parts, and I found at the centres of Part I and Part II the kind of mysterious statements that urge the reader to read on and discover how Sherlock solves the crime.

Halfway through Part I, a shonky detective, Lestrade, believes a murderer has written part of the name Rachel on the wall, in blood.  But Sherlock’s logical reasoning produces a different theory on how the man was murdered:

“Poison,” said Sherlock Holmes curtly, and strode off. “One other thing, Lestrade,” he added, turning round at the door: “‘Rache,’ is the German for ‘revenge’;  so don’t lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.”

File:Friston-holmes.gif
Original illustration of Holmes with magnifying glass, by D. H. Friston (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Part II next time . . .

*****

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Pairs

Marianne from East of Málaga challenges us this October to find photos of pairs.  She defines it: A pair is a set of two things used together or regarded as a unit.

These lighthouse feet made me stop and look twice – the rust in its reddishness turns deterioration into art.  The lighthouse is set on a big concrete block so its feet were at my eye level as I wandered around it.

Lighthouse feet, Port-Vendres, France
Lighthouse feet, Port-Vendres, France

And a pair of nights ago I photographed a pair of bottles and two pairs of eyes on a pair of sons.  We were in a restaurant provocatively named Me and Mrs Jones (that’s not a pair).

Bottles of Canberra water in 'Me and Mrs Jones' restaurant, Canberra
Bottles of Canberra water in ‘Me and Mrs Jones’ restaurant, Canberra

Marianne likes us to spread the blog love, so I’ll tell you I loved a poem I read here.  In fact I printed it out and stuck it on my fridge.

And I read a blog about amazing historical embroidery at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, including a video demonstrating how women kept their arms out of the way of crinoline skirts, here.

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 10

Today I’ve found a book on my shelf which I’d forgotten about because it’s not memorable, despite its fame as a prizewinner.  I’d bought it and read it because of an excellent piece I knew by the same author;  it was about translating, a thing I love to do.  So, I know he’s a great writer.  I don’t think, however, that Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, the reflections of a self-indulgent older man, deserved a big prize.  Nevertheless, it has a middle as all writing does, and the narration on pages 75 and 76, at the rough centre, is well-written, the work of a close observer.

Here the narrator is lunching with his ex-wife, discussing an issue which has arisen about one of his ex-girlfriends, ‘The Fruitcake’:

There was a silence.  We ate.  Then Margaret tapped her knife against my plate.

“And if the presumably still-unmarried Miss Veronica Ford happened to walk into this café and sit down at our table, how would the long-divorced Mr Anthony Webster react?”

She always puts her finger on it, doesn’t she?

“I don’t think I’d be especially pleased to see her.”

Something in the formality of my tone caused Margaret to smile.  “Intrigued?  Start rolling up your sleeve and taking off your watch?”

I blushed.  You haven’t seen a bald man in his sixties blush?  Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old.  And because it’s rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 9

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is the first adult novel I ever read.  I remember the moment when I was thirteen and found it on the school library bookshelf, and I remember how grown-up I felt reading it.

In my $1 edition I bought at a flea market, I searched today for the pages at the centre of the novel, where I was surprised to find Jane and Rochester falling in love;  this then is the turning point.

It’s a huge problem for her;  he is anything but available.  Jane feels now, at 19 years old, as though she has mastered life.  But the second half of the story from here on will reveal that she stands not on a rock of love but on quicksand, while above her, hidden in the attic, is his mad wife:

“A sneer, however, whether covert or open, had now no longer that power over me it once possessed:  as I sat between my cousins, I was surprised to find how easy I felt under the total neglect of the one and the semi-sarcastic attentions of the other – Eliza did not mortify, nor Georgiana ruffle me.  The fact was, I had other things to think about;  within the last few months feelings had been stirred in me so much more potent than any they could raise – pains and pleasures so much more acute and exquisite had been excited than any it was in their power to inflict or bestow – that their airs gave me no concern either for good or bad.”

*****

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Height

Ailsa wrote a story about a slim steep-sided trail on her way to Mount St Helens, and asks us to post photos of other things that reach to the skies.

I like this photo of a pyramid emerging from the desert sands.  See the rooftop at the sandline?  It looks tiny but is probably the normal size for normal humans.  Unlike pyramids.

Pyramid_Egypt
Pyramid, Egypt, c1941,  from my father’s war album
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Weekly photo challenge: Good morning

Good morning!  Just having my morning cappuccino and reading, by coincidence, The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells.

I’m up to the part where Graham has escaped from the room where he awoke after sleeping for 203 years…

Good Morning2

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 8

This morning I pulled from my bookshelf a translation of Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.  I flipped to the end, p. 1,463!  Then I backflipped to the middle, where I read on p. 731 the essence of Hugo’s message about the miserable poor of France.  Next to it on the shelf was a five-volume set of the novel in French, so I pulled out the third volume and had a go at translating the lines myself.

Just before the lines of my translation, the narrator had recounted an incident where Marius, walking at a wintry nightfall, had run into two barefoot girls in torn rags whispering to each other about their narrow escape from the police.  Once they had disappeared, he continued his walk:

Along the way, in an alley off the Rue Mouffetard, he saw a child’s coffin covered in a black cloth, lying across three chairs and lighted by a candle.  It brought to his mind the two girls of the twilight.

‘Poor mothers!’ he thought.  ‘There’s one thing sadder than seeing your children die, and that’s seeing them live bad lives.’

*****

 

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 7

Sometimes at the centre of a novel a new character is introduced who changes everything.  In John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, it’s not until the middle that we meet the title character.  And it’s then that everything changes for the German boy, Bruno:

“The boy was smaller than Bruno and was sitting on the ground with a forlorn expression. He wore the same striped pyjamas that all the other people on that side of the fence wore, and a striped cloth cap on his head. He wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks and his feet were rather dirty. On his arm he wore an armband with a star on it.”

*****

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Journey to the centre: Great middle lines – 6

Half-way through Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, the patient arrives at the point in his tale where his tough personal barrier was penetrated.  ‘I am a man who kept the codes of my behaviour separate,’ he says on p. 144.  Then the turning point:  we learn why and how he ended up in hospital (well, a hospital of sorts), the turning point in his life where it dawned on him that Clifton’s wife, Katharine, was breaking down his defences, and this led to a relationship, and this led to an accident.  On p. 150 of 300 pages, I read this:

“He said later it was propinquity.  Propinquity in the desert.  It does that here, he said.  He loved the word – the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours.  Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps.  In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.”

*****

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Weekly photo challenge: Saturation relaxation

Shaggy on shaggy - pre-haircut
Shaggy on shaggy:  pre-haircut.

I was about to throw out this old shaggy bath mat when I walked past my dog’s bed and had a brain flash, thinking his bed could do with a bit of extra padding.  I threw it down and invited him in.  The result was saturation shagginess and saturation relaxation.

Shaggy on shaggy - post-haircut
Shaggy on shaggy: post-haircut.

Check out the floorboard at the bottom left:  looks like a conehead relaxing!

And check out the relaxed cat on some painted steps here at Ailsa’s relaxing blog.