It’s been almost half a year since my last report on my nightly reading, so I thought I’d update you all with a particularly fine quote from our current volume of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, The Commodore
‘In any case I should like to have Brigid under the care of Dr Llers, who has had more success with children of her kind than any man in Europe. Not, the dear God be thanked beyond measure, that she seems to need the care of any medical man at all. The change is of the nature one usually associated with miracles alone.’
‘It is utterly beyond my comprehension,’ said Clarissa. ‘Nothing I have ever known has given me such happiness – day after day, like a flower opening. She prattled for quite a while with Padeen and the animals, and now she does so with me and the maids: a little shy of English at first. To begin with she spoke it only to the cats and the sow.’
Stephen laughed with pleasure, an odd grating sound; and after a while he said, ‘She will learn Spanish too, Castellano. I am sorry it will not be Catalan, a much finer, older, purer, more mellifluous language, with far greater writers – think of En Ramón Llull – but as Captain Aubrey often says, “You cannot both have a stitch in time and eat it.”‘
Llull is real; I don’t know about Llers.
I wonder if Studiolum has written about Llull – he’s a Majorcan writer. Is this the first speech bubble?
you want the acute on the last i (í) in pa/idi/n
apollo sic, rss fail, nevermind the above
There’s an old joke, I suppose you would call it, about the scholar collecting traditional lore from Irish farmers, and he discovers that they talk to their animals in English, although the rest of the time they only speak Irish. He asks why and they tell him “They’re just animals. English is good enough for them.”
The “stitch in time” thing is very nice, because we can’t imagine Aubrey saying anything of the kind — his idiomatic confusions are much simpler, of the “bear with a sore thumb” type. This is Stephen in such a state of happiness that he actually constructs a feeble joke — and then fathers it on Jack.
Yes, O’Brian is wonderful that way.
Yes, this is a wonderful quote. I’ve been saving the Patrick O’Brien books, for a very rainy day.
Several rainy weeks, I think.
Oddly enough, Llull’s Blanquerna is the oldest surviving work in any language to mention Tabelbala, one of the oases I’m studying. He’s a rather interesting character – among other things, he was arguably the first European novelist, and studied Arabic literature extensively.
Huh, I didn’t know that. Interesting indeed.
And here was my introduction to Ramon Lull, from Harry Harrison’s novel Deathworld 2 (aka The Ethical Engineer):
It might be reassuring to know that, in my experience, by the time you have read the 20+ volumes of Aubrey-Maturin, you can start again with even greater pleasure. I am on my fourth circumnavigation – particularly enjoying the punctuation (and even the occasional lapse?) and the whiches. Question: did the US publishers edit out restrictive which and substitute that’s throughout, or was it POB’s own style?
Which I meant “thats”, in course, so.