It bores me a little writing about Aldous so often. He doesn\u2019t change at all. He told me he had observed a change in me. He, his wife and my husband were discussing all sorts of hypothetical things they knew nothing about. It bored me terribly. What is the point of speculating?<\/p>\n
I told him I had lost interest in the \u201coccult\u201d and related subjects, and he said he had indeed noticed a change in me. I had a little heart beating, a feeling of exposure, I suppose, and asked him to explain. He had observed, he said, a tendency away from \u201cexposed views\u201d. I told him my everyday life held all my attention and kept me busy, I had no time left for anything else. That was his impression, he said. What with my family and responsibilities as a mother and wife, I had probably become more\u2026earthbound! I don\u2019t know what he meant by that, but said the opposite might be true. He was quite willing to grant me that, too!<\/p>\n
I know what he has observed: I\u2019ve stopped talking about food, alternative medicine, dangerous chemicals, etc. In fact he finds it difficult these days to have an argument with me. Perhaps he misses that. He said recently that a lot of what I had said in former years was quite right! Pity he didn\u2019t acknowledge that at the time. I\u2019ve grown out of it now. He\u2019s just a bit behind.<\/p>\n
He talked about their own mushrooms, how good they were, how exquisitely flavoured, grown in the field on natural cow-manure. Did we know what terrible chemical treatment mass-produced mushrooms get? He and his wife raised their eyebrows at the thought of it and I shuddered duly. They don\u2019t grow their own cabbage and therefore don\u2019t talk about the chemicals mass-produced cabbage is getting\u2026Pointless putting oneself off\u2026<\/p>\n
They then had us spellbound by discussing the new terrible disease which was able to spread due to \u201cimmoral\u201d behaviour. Fancy the Church not speaking up and showing people the right way! Keeping up the practice of communal chalice as well! They were indignant and I bored. I yawned, and he must have thought I was exhausted and maybe Zn deficient after all\u2026My husband says he\u2019 s very perceptive\u2026
\nAfter that they told us about a TV programme: a murderer who had two different personalities; a woman with even six or seven different ones \u2013 reduced to three for the purposes of a film that had been made about her, etc., etc.<\/p>\n
My husband said, was it time to make tea \u2013 a ritual meaning that the end of the evening is near. I brought in the tea and the conversation became more lively.
\nAldous complained about the sloppy use of language, people using words without being aware of their meaning, using meaningless words in fact. Like \u201canticipate\u201d. The meaning it has and the meaning American usage has imposed on it. A degradation of the language. Not being a native speaker, I could only say that the supposedly American usage was the only one I knew which means it must have been around for quite a few years.<\/p>\n
Accusing people of sloppy use of language, on the other hand, using meaningless words, using words lightly without meaning them— what about him saying with a laugh: \u201cIf such and such an \u2018evil force\u2019 offered me to make me younger by twenty years, I wouldn\u2019t want it.\u201d Why mention \u2018evil force\u2019? Aldous turned this way and that, looking for a way out with a joke, offering far-fetched explanations, questioning other people\u2019s intelligence, becoming entangled with the grammatical structure of conditional clauses \u2013 all the time valiantly supported by his wife, like an echo \u2013 until in the end he was pinned down mercilessly, much to my husband\u2019s delight who declared relief at seeing \u201csomebody else at the receiving end\u201d. Aldous answered: \u201cYou have it all the time, do you?\u201d Anyway, all Aldous had wanted to say, I understood, was \u201cIf he could have twenty years of his life back\u2026\u201d. He thought this was rather a dry way of putting it, therefore he had chosen a more \u201cflowery\u201d expression.<\/p>\n
I asked him about the meaning of \u201cIn the beginning was the word\u2026\u201d I shouldn\u2019t have done, because he said \u201cword\u201d means \u201cpurpose\u201d and then indulged himself for the umpteenth time in a talk on his favourite idea: the universe being governed by purpose. I yawned again. It was nearly midnight. They left us thanking us for a lovely evening.<\/p>\n
Aldous was due to see his doctor next day to have his ears syringed. Full of wax, his wife explained, he could hardly hear\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It bores me a little writing about Aldous so often. He doesn\u2019t change at all. He told me he had observed a change in me. He, his wife and my husband were discussing all sorts of hypothetical things they knew nothing about. It bored me terribly. What is the point of speculating? I told him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-aloud"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}