Friday, June 24, 2016

Parenthetical Remarks

My wife—the lovely Beth Alyson—after reading my previous blogs, said to me, "You always write like that."

"Like what?" I asked.

"You always write with asides, making remarks that stop the flow of what you write. It can be very confusing."

Well, I thought about that for a while, and I admitted that she had a point. That's often the way I write. I have even been criticized for letting that kind of thing creep into my technical writing from time to time. Not often, but enough to earn me some demerits with certain of my managers.

I guess this is one of the (good) reasons I decided to start blogging: I can be as parenthetical and digressive as I like, and nobody can take exception to it, since I am writing for myself—and perhaps you, gentle reader. And even if someone does take exception to it, I'm not obliged to change it, or even defend it, it any way.

I have recently begun reading (and re-reading, in some cases) some of the "classic" works of literature, and I long thought that the record for the longest sentence in literature was held by one in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I have since been disabused of this notion. I know very little French, and have only a passable knowledge of two other languages: Spanish and German. Any others I may have a smattering of a word or two, but not enough to get by should someone drop me in Tokyo or India, for example.

I have even endeavored to learn Mandarin Chinese, but my Rosetta Stone lessons (complete, supposedly) on this noble language still sit in the box, somewhere in my office, yet to be assayed.

I have much yet to read of the classics, and I don't have the facility of recall that some of the characters in literature have when they come up with exact quotations from anyone—especially in the original Latin or Greek—but I will start taking notes, I think, when I come across something I think worthwhile remembering.

In that vein, and since I have but recently finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, I'd like to offer the following quotation which I shared with my lovely wife as soon as I had seen it. In my imagination, she must say it to me, or have said it to me, or will certainly say it to me:
"Could I ever have loved you, had I not known you better than you know yourself?"
Such is the love of a good woman, whom I sometimes think I scarcely deserve.

Enough for now, my friends. It is late and I am tired.

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