LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
Kind of, “It was very muddy in London” but nobody talks like this today, so it sounds very strange. I’m personally not a fan. I don’t think there’s a complete sentence anywhere in that passage.
Sentence fragments, capitalized and punctuated like fresh immigrants assimilating to their new mother.
Nabokov seemed to think that the fog was important. I guess it’s a novel about a legal case, and maybe the metaphor is the “fog” of legal confusion.
Nabokov? You mean that guy from The Police song?
Hey - don’t stand so close to me.
Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.
Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?