Jung and Sue sat silent in the still darkness. Jung said at last, “If we are to get a message to the king, show him Hardspear’s ring, then we can’t travel openly… We can’t stay at any inn. Can’t use public transport. It will be rough. Doable, but rough… I can do it alone, but I’d like you with me. I don’t think you will be safe, not at home.
“I don’t care if it’s rough! I’m going!…”
They sat in the dark, and Jung said, “I think I saw your mother that day.”
“Not my mother! My aunt! And she doesn’t like me!”
Jung observed, “She didn’t look very friendly, that day, when I saw her.”
“She’s horrid… She hates me… I’m just waiting to grow up so I can leave…”
Jung said, “Well, there’s poor parents, horrid parents… but hating parents are the worst. Is it only when she’s angry?”
“No.” They sat in the dark with that “no” echoing in the night.
Jung stretched an arm over Sue’s shoulders. “You’ve had it rough.”
She leaned against him and cried, for a long time. Jung handed her a hankercheif and held her with one arm, then two.
At last he said, “We’ll go together. Win, lose or draw… What would happen if you didn’t return?”
“She’d be glad. And she’d be glad of a chance to blame the army, raise her voice, get some money for her silence.”
“We’ll just have to get word to her, and I know how.”
“How?”
“We’ll spend the night under that tree, in the morning we’ll grab a ride with the milk run, and I’ll pay the driver to deliver a message.”
…
…
Part Two,
Nonfiction,
After a U.S. professor, at a normal NON-household name university
wrote about students being unmotivated, uncivil, and dam discourteous.
Sean Crawford said…
I miss the world I never knew that Simone de Beauvoir describes where when her peers entered a (cafe?) in pairs, having their conversations-to-get-somewhere… other pairs, entering later, would stay separate. The manager was amazed they wouldn’t all congregate together.
Say, I’ve noticed that if a small group conversation is interrupted, the conversation thread is lost, not resumed: As if people weren’t keen to learn or get somewhere.
The flip side to Simone’s student life, is that although her peers were intellectuals, and her boyfriend was Jean-Paul Sarte, she describes the majority of students as frivolous.
My degree was obtained in another ecosystem, in Canada, so maybe when I retire next year I will drive to the States, stop off in a university, and see for myself what things are like.
I might add that Canada too has to test new admissions to see if they have a high school level of composition. Recently it struck me that this testing started just a few years after the admission requirement for a second language was abolished. I wonder if there’s a connection.
November 11, 2021 10:38 PMMichael Leddy said…
A second language is indeed the way many students learn (in a conscious way) something of the grammar of a first language. So many things contribute to the state of student writing — their reading (or lack of reading), emphasis on mechanical writing models (the five-paragraph essay), the extent to which grammar and usage are matters under discussion, what kind of feedback teachers give. It certainly doesn’t hurt to test the waters in/of a second language.
November 12, 2021 9:27 AM
…
…
Sean Crawford
Under our first trifling rain and snowfall,
It’s an ill climate change that blows no good,
November
2021
Blog Notes: It occurs to me that some blogs, this month, will be featuring fiction every day. Because it’s “nanomo,” national novel writing month. Using the internet, amateurs like me encourage each other to write at length, every day, for one month. Target: 50,000 words. Which would make my own fiction posting here seem pretty paltry. Even though I haven’t signed up for nanomo, maybe I’d better do a little more fiction writing.
