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weather, plus ideas about characters
2002-10-02 - 9:32 a.m. Okay, I intend to do better today. In the first place, it's fall around here. This means that it's a bit cooler in the morning, and you might be tempted into wearing something with long sleeves. This would be a mistake, because by the afternoon, if you go outside, you'll be too hot. It's an interesting kind of warmth -- it's not really hot. It feels kind of thin. A breeze could kick up and then you'd be cold. But if you're moving around, it's warm enough. It's also dry and windy. It's fire season, after all. It hasn't rained since June, probably, so there's lots of dust and dirt to swirl around in the wind. Pretty soon, Nora will say, "I wish it would rain." I wish it would rain, too -- I'm tired of watering. I'm ready for the automatic watering service to kick in. Nora played with the school soccer team yesterday. Apparently they lost, 8 to 1, or maybe 9 to 1. Hmmm. What else -- Oh, in continuation of my questionable movie viewing, last night I watched the first piece of Braveheart. Bleh. A bit too much even for me. Anyway, I think I'll watch the rest tonight. What else -- one of my coworkers has turned the tiny bulletin board outside our office into a shrine to resistance to the war against Iraq. I agree, completely. But it's sort of an interesting gambit in office politics. My boss, in general, does not like us to use that bulletin board. He's afraid that someone will find us in here. Probably, having that stuff up there is like a wild hair up his butt. Probably, he is imagining republicans storming our office and dragging us out into the air. We shall see what happens. Back to my movie viewing -- it seems a bit cynical to blame the whole uprising on the English nobility wanting to sleep with Scottish peasants. I mean -- maybe that really is the truth, but I'm suspicious that there's more to the story. And back to Jane Eyre -- I've been thinking a lot about characters. I think because this is a book that I did read when I was quite young, I realized yesterday that I really did use to think that the characters were real people. I mean -- I imagined that what they did in books sprang out of some inner coherence, or something. Whereas now, I'm more inclined to think that they're just parts of books that do what the authors tell them to do. But which is really correct? Writers talk about their characters talking to them, and refusing to do what the writers had originally intended for them to do. I wonder if it's also partly a piece of 19th C. vs. modern novels -- I mean, do the people in To the Lighthouse seem as real as Jane Eyre? (I don't know -- I'd have to read TtL again.) What about the people in the Virgin Suicides? Certainly there are people in Dickens novels who aren't exactly real -- Mrs. Jellyby, for instance. Although there are people in Jane Eyre like that, too -- Anyway -- I don't know, but I'm thinking about it. Okay, then.
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