No Stupid Questions

Oh of course it's Charles fucking Dickens Yeah I get the gist of it but it's unpleasant to read and doesn't tell me much

I have aphantasia so I can't visualize much of anything. But I did understand the passage.

I read a lot of fictionalized historical diaries as a kid (i.e., diary entries written from the POV of a fictional character living during important historical events) because they were given to me as gifts and the writing style is somewhat similar, though not as creative with imagery as Dickens.

Yeah, and I can translate it for you if need be.

Sure. It paints a very vivid picture, I love it.

Never read anything by Dickens before except for A Christmas Carol (and that was for school) but this is now on my reading list :^)

Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.

Yes I can. And disagree with virtually everyone else; I think that this along with virtually everything else by Dickens is absolutely top class writing. The meaning of every individual phrase isn't the point, the whole passage just gives the perfect impression of the scene he is trying to convey. Also, remember much of Dickens' stuff was written to be read out loud. Try that, it helps!

I started reading, I drifted away at about the mud part so I restarted. This is really not my cuppa tea when it comes to text. On the second run I did better but no, I didn't manage to visualize everything. The Megalosaurus sentence doesn't make much sense to me. The text is convoluted, boring, and depressing but yes I guess I see the shitty street, the animals, the people -a crowd-, the miserable weather.

I'm aware of more information I'm not really processing but I'm just too annoyed at the text to apply the necessary brainpower required to digest it. It's almost 2 AM and I'm tired.

Then I make it to the end and realize it's Dickens, and that explains everything. I never liked his writing. Good night.

Yup, I was able to understand and visualize all of it. The only thing I didn't know was what "Michaelmas" was, but I determined its salient meaning well enough from context (it's a Christian festival celebrated on September 29, which is redundant information with the immediately following reference to "implacable November weather" which sets the approximate time of year just as well).

The passage can be summarized into two fundamental points of information:

• The weather on this particular day in London was typical.
• Charles Dickens was paid by the word.

Yes, but it's really cumbersome to us foreigners.

This is something we would have been asked to read and analyze in grade 8

Yes. Why do you ask?

Kind of, "It was very muddy in London" but nobody talks like this today, so it sounds very strange. I'm personally not a fan. I don't think there's a complete sentence anywhere in that passage.

Sentence fragments, capitalized and punctuated like fresh immigrants assimilating to their new mother.

I have never read Bleak House, nor do I even know the outline of the plot. This is what I'm getting from it:

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

The scene is London. Michaelmas' term (shift?) has just finished, and the Lord Chancellor is now sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.

Implacable November weather.

The weather is cold, wet and overcast, as one would expect for November.

As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on Holborn Hill.

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

Smoke drifts downward from the chimneys; soft black ash the size of snowflakes coats exposed surfaces. It's as if everything is dressed in black to mourn the death of the Sun's warmth and light.

Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

Dogs and horses are covered in the mud up to their eyeballs, and their owners can hardly tell which ones are theirs.

Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Pedestrians fight through the crowded street, their umbrellas bumping into each other, like a seething angry mob. They slip and lose traction at street corners, like the thousands of pedestrians that came before them since the day broke (although "daybreak" is a meaningless term for a day as grey and cloudy as this one.) The mud continues to cake on their boots where the pavement ends, as if the mud was somehow multiplying like money in a rich man's investment account.

I would have understood Michaelmas as the feast day of Saint Michael. My studies of hagiography are too limited to say which day that is or why he got sainted. Nor did I know that British people used (maybe still use) that term to refer to an entire season.

Understanding and being able to visualize are different things. Some people can't visualize at all

I can get a pretty decent picture of the scene excepting that the writer names these places by name and I don't know what they actually look like so the layout is entirely being generated by my imagination. It's wet. It's muddy. It's miserable and cold. And It's in London, a long time ago so everyone's dressed like Harry Potter characters and covered in shit ala Monty Python's Holy Grail.

Yes, but it was a slog. My summary:

the weather was dreadful, some high muckety muck is back from Michaelmas break. The scene is in London. All the people and critters in the street are covered in mud. The ground is slippery with mud (and probably horse crap, but we're too polite to mention it). OMG the weather sucks, very wet and dreary. Everyone's in a bad mood. Did I mention it's wet and icky and muddy and the weather is bad?

I can read it, but for some reason I read it like a screenplay being read about some old-timey detective story.

Yes, i started drifting away twice and had to think a moment a couple more times but im not a native english speaker so im fine with that.

Sure—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century literature.

Fed up people are struggling to walk, slipping and bumping into each other in a gloomy, wet, grey, smokey, dreary, sunless, muddy street in November in Dickensian London. Everything is caked in filth. Then someone swallowed a Thesaurus, ate a couple of mushrooms and tried to describe the scene.

Yes, although slowly. It might be bad because I don't speak English natively.

Yes, although I'm struck by some of the words, particularly this sense of 'wonderful".

And now I'm even more glad that it's sunny out here right now and I can hear birds.

Also yes.

Yes.

Yes. Read it out loud quickly. It helps me.

Yes, but I spent a lot of my childhood reading things like Sherlock Holmes, Jules Verne, count of Monte cristo, Oliver twist, etc.