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.
Yes. But I van imagine my children being clueless. English is our third language but I think that’s not the issue. They just haven’t read enough. They are consumers and aren’t accustomed to active reading.
Michaelmas out this bitch, yo, and LC up in Lincoln’s crib. Weather is off the hook, frfr. Streets so muddy like Noah’s flood just got done, I ain’t even be shook if a Dino come roaring up at me lmao. Chimney smoke be hanging low like Snoop Drizzle in town and ash be falling like fuckin snow, no cap. Watching the dogs and horses getting about covered in filth like they be swimming in it. Shit is wild, fam, homies on foot got no rizz, they be slipping and sliding on mud just tryna get along down the street for reals, stepping in mud and it be stepping back on them like they only drip.
I can’t really visualize things in general. Due to that, if you tell me it’s muddy that’s most of the information I get. My brain won’t automatically try to put mud on the horses or add other details.
Here the specifics help a lot and I have a better sense of the muddy day for it.
No, because aphantasia. I love the turns of phrase, though.
yea and I don’t like how its written
I also read the news about the same research article you did.
I was surprised how much I could understand, based on how much trouble people in the study had. Sounds like a wet miserable city our Lord Chancellor is in.
I have aphantasia so I can’t visualize much of anything. But I did understand the passage.
I read a lot of fictionalized historical diaries as a kid (i.e., diary entries written from the POV of a fictional character living during important historical events) because they were given to me as gifts and the writing style is somewhat similar, though not as creative with imagery as Dickens.
What does understanding mean for you in this sense?
I don’t mean to come across as ignorant or disrespectful - just curious. A big part of my understanding of that passage is the process of visualization. When I read that passage, I feel it. It’s wet, it’s filthy, everyone is upset and I imagine faces scowling. That’s what “understanding” means to me as a process.
I sort of just try to contextualize the words and their meaning and draw upon my experiences to fill in the blanks. I still have other senses and my own mental concept of things and how they fit together. I can imagine “faces scowling” or a muddy street and how that affects the story and its setting, just not visually.
I will often infer the emotions of a scene and place myself within that context, since I usually am drawn to more character-driven experiences. I know what a room will look like based on the description, I just can’t hold an image of it in my mind.
I should also note that there are levels of aphantasia and everyone is different. I kind of have a little bit of visualization, but not much. Like limbs moving, some motions, etc. kind of like stick figures that can barely move. It doesn’t allow me to “see” things with any detail, and if I were to try to visualize (for example) a golfer taking a swing, the swing gets to the ball and then stops. There’s no physics applied to it.
I actually joined a psychological study in undergrad, because it was mandatory to do some, that was about visualizing and that’s how I discovered that I have aphantasia. They asked me to visualize and describe certain things and I was like, “I can’t” for basically every question. The researcher’s face was sort of priceless, lol.
because it was mandatory to do some
Usually understood to be a violation of ethics if they didn’t provide you the opportunity for an alternative assignment btw.
Thanks for the explanation. It’s very interesting to learn about how others perceive the world.
Yeah, there totally were alternatives, but they were like, writing a 20-page paper or presenting a topic directly to the professor during her office hours.
It just seemed like more of a time-save for me and a boon to the researchers to just do some studies. I think it was only 5-10 and it was really simple to sign up.
Oh of course it’s Charles fucking Dickens Yeah I get the gist of it but it’s unpleasant to read and doesn’t tell me much
Yeah, and I can translate it for you if need be.
Sure. It paints a very vivid picture, I love it.
Never read anything by Dickens before except for A Christmas Carol (and that was for school) but this is now on my reading list :^)
Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.
Yes, but it’s really cumbersome to us foreigners.
Yes I can. And disagree with virtually everyone else; I think that this along with virtually everything else by Dickens is absolutely top class writing. The meaning of every individual phrase isn’t the point, the whole passage just gives the perfect impression of the scene he is trying to convey. Also, remember much of Dickens’ stuff was written to be read out loud. Try that, it helps!
This is something we would have been asked to read and analyze in grade 8
I would have understood Michaelmas as the feast day of Saint Michael. My studies of hagiography are too limited to say which day that is or why he got sainted. Nor did I know that British people used (maybe still use) that term to refer to an entire season.
