Pause you who read this

Image taken in Siena, Italy, courtesy of topleftpixel.com

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. - Charles Dickens, in Great Expectations

I went to the National Hospital today. Elbe called me just before 10 (fortunately not earlier, because I went to bed late) and so supervised brats emptying two huge piles of dirt onto the hostel gardens for more than 2 hours. Lunch was good, but marred by another brat kicking his toe into a volcano of bloood. So I drove him to hospital and spent most of the afternoon there waiting for the piece of skin to snipped off and the volcano banadaged.

I've also written a letter to the Head of the English Department, as I've not been given much help, outside of class, from my lecturer, Prof Raftery, regarding everything from the timetable (which differs from the official timetable) to study notes to other things I've required her assistance with. I've found her dismissive approach improper, so feel I want to make sure it is addressed. It annoys me a lot to have to make the effort to attend class, get study materials, and find no one is there, and nothing has been made available.

That said, I am actually enjoying Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations a great deal. These books are classics because they incisively reflect the human condition, and they speak to me about mine.

Here's more Dickens:

On consumerism/capitalism:
We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

On suffering:
" . . .suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape."

On being someone of substance (rather than appearing to be):
. . . it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.

On being dishonest to ourselves:
All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

On humility and changing our hearts:
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.

I do not know the American gentleman, god forgive me for putting two such words together.

Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.

On Memories:
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

On Friendship:
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park