Thursday: Hili dialogue

February 11, 2016 • 6:00 am

It’s Thursday, and I give a big talk tomorrow, so I’m taking it easy. But that means that I’ll get to post Hili today instead of asking Grania to do it (many thanks to her for largely running the site while I’m busy). I have many serious things to write about: free will, accommodationism, big scary spiders, a domestication of cats in China, a new paper on why religion makes us behave properly, and so on, but I want to wait till I get back to the States and have the time to write these posts thoughtfully. In the meantime, I do my best.

Since I’m in England, I’ll post only British-related events that happened on November 11. On this day in 1534, Henry VIII was named as the Head of the Church of England. Wikipedia notes that on November 11, 1938, “BBC Television produce[d] the world’s first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that coined the term ‘robot’.” On November 11, 1915, Patrick Leigh Fermor, one of my favorite travel writers, was born (died 2011). On this day in 1923, Anthony Flew was born, as was designer Mary Quant in 1934. Few notable Brits died on this day. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili riffs on Sherlock Holmes’s fateful words in His Last Bow*:

A: Where are you going?
Hili: To the west, the sun is running away from me.

P1030868

In Polish:
Ja: Gdzie idziesz?
Hili: Na zachód, bo mi słońce ucieka.

*(From Wikipedia): In reference to the impending War, Holmes says, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.” Watson misinterprets the meaning of the words and says, “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”

“Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

Holmes was, for once, wrong.

25 thoughts on “Thursday: Hili dialogue”

  1. November ?

    On 11 February 1949, my mother’s father smelled something funny about 2 in the morning; but in his drunken stupor, lit a match — and blew himself and my grandma, sleeping next to him, both to Eternity.

    The odor was natural gas. Beaumont, Texas.

    And, yeah, then my mother, back here inside a rural snowbank with three tiny children, gets .that. telephone call.

    Blue

    1. Ow. Nasty… Your poor mother.
      I suppose even if he had put on a light there still might have been an explosion though?

      1. Good chance of it. There’s a good reason that firefighters (including those put through fire fighting training for working on the rigs) and mine workers use lighting systems that are carefully sealed to prevent the ingress of gas. Or, as the certification authority for the UK puts it in its name “The British Association for the Safety of Electrical Equipment in Flammable Atmospheres” (a.k.a. BASEEFA).
        Nasty story, but unfortunately not terribly uncommon. If you do suspect a gas leak, try to get out of the premises WITHOUT using uncertified lighting. (If you have a proper diving torch, that is likely to be OK to use ; but only if there is significant chance of injury if you attempt to exit in the dark. I keep a certified torch in my working-gear bag, in my travelling rucksack … but that’s because I have already got the gear and a healthy does of paranoia.)
        Incidentally, as it comes out of the ground, natural gas is typically odourless. Certainly by the time it has been processed to remove CO2, dry it (to reduce pipeline corrosion) etc, it should be odourless. When it is put into a consumer distribution network (or into a bottle) a small amount of a very smelly substance is added specifically to act as a leak detector for the un-augmented Mark-1 human nose.

        1. Thank you: that is a helpful lesson.

          And the other one is: Excessive drinking of alcohol by some and in ways other than by subsequent drunkard – maneuvering of vehicular crafts, may and can take (all the way) down another. Actually … … will take down a whole lotta.lotta others.

          In addition to my killed grandma and my mama’s losses, I and three other siblings and very, very many cousins lived nearly our entire lives without these (actually quite young when annihilated -) grandparents.

          Blue

          1. We used to get Ronan Point as one of the classroom examples. And the opening scenes from “Hellfighters“. There was a couple killed in Lanarkshire a few years ago too. Happens all the time. Lessons don’t get learned.

      1. Ah – no … that was a 150 years earlier when a scholar murdered a woman & in retaliation two scholars were hanged.

        “The scholars were eventually routed.” Good! 🙂

    2. On this day in 2009, I adopted Isa, a sweet 5-year-old Main Coon mix, from the local Humane society. She has turned out to be the sweetest cat I have ever been enstaffed to. I will get her some treats and give her cuddles on behalf of WEIT readers.

  4. An east wind it was. If you have time for only one book on WWI, it should be Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August.

  5. “To the west, the sun is running away from me.”

    Hili, you are confused. The horizon is moving up.

    Kudos to anyone who recognizes the reference.

    In Polish: “Hili, jesteś zdezorientowany. Horyzont porusza się w górę.”*

    *This is Google Translate, so I won’t vouch for its integrity.

    1. Something is not right with this Google Translation. Let’s take it word for word:
      Na zachód, bo mi słońce ucieka.
      Na = to
      zachód = west
      bo = because
      mi = me
      słońce = sun
      ucieka = runs away

      1. Thank you, but the Google Translate was for the sentences “Hili, you are confused. The horizon is moving up.”. I’m sorry if I didn’t make that clear.

        I did have some Polish relatives, but they never wanted us to understand them when they were arguing, so none of the rest of us learned any of the language.

  6. Doyle might have revised Holmes’s speech if he knew that in the future (a) several members of Doyle’s family would die in the war, along with the flower of England’s youth, thus turning Doyle into a pathetically fanatic Spiritualist (b) another war would follow in two decades, which would leave Britain nearly bankrupt and unable to maintain the empire Doyle supported so vociferously (c) 21st century Britain, enjoying far less power and influence over Europe and the world, is now barely able to hold itself together, since Doyle’s native Scotland wants out and will likely attempt another exit, and (d) while Sherlock Holmes remains as popular as ever, Doyle’s other work, which he cared about far more, is little read.

    1. I read Conan Doyle’s other works, as a teenager. The Professor Challenger science-fiction novels (which reminded me most of John Wyndham’s, actually), including The Lost World, which was made into a sci-fi film in the 60’s, and of which Jurassic Park was an unashamed ripoff. The Horror of the Heights really spooked me.
      And his historical novels, such as The White Company, which is how I found out that Britain occupied large parts of France for decades. (My school-learned history had large gaps in it, and though I’d heard of the battles of Crecy, Agincourt and Poitiers as famous victories, I had no idea what they related to).

      A very readable author, by the standards of the day, and streets ahead of Dickens or H G Wells IMO.

      cr

      1. I’ve read half of the Brigadier Gerard stories, which are amusing and enjoyable, and have also read The White Company and Sir Nigel, which were similarly well-done but suffered from Doyle’s attempt to have the characters talk in pseudo-middle English. This created a stilted effect–doubly regrettable in an author who is otherwise, as you noted, very readable.

        Though Doyle wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing it, the Sherlock Holmes stories are vastly more popular than his other work for good reasons. Because he was not writing “serious” fiction, his style was its simplest and most muscular apex. The lowness of his subject matter also encouraged his subtle, impish sense of humor. The Holmes short stories are perhaps the most enjoyable pieces of light literature ever written.

        I’ve heard good things about Doyle’s horror and science fiction stories, and will have to read them someday.

        1. It’s so long ago I’ve forgotten the ‘flavour’ of Doyle’s historical novels, other than that I discovered, through reading them, that history was not entirely 100% boring stuff about long-dead people. Evidently the story outweighed the stuffiness of the dialogue. Those people stuck in history actually did some interesting things.

          cr

        2. … and of course we know that Conan Doyle was embarrassed by the attention given to Holmes, to the point where he tried to kill him by throwing him over the Reichenbach Falls – an event which the good citizens of Meiringen have shamelessly profited by ever since.

          So then of course he had to revive him. Was this the first ever ‘back from the dead’ of a popular fictional hero, I wonder?

          cr

  7. “on November 11, 1938, “BBC Television produce[d] the world’s first ever science fiction television program, ”

    … and it *wasn’t* Dr Who…

    cr

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