Visualizing when reading in a foreign language

For many years I've been slowly working on improving my French. I went through a few courses and practiced enough that I am capable of reading, although writing and conversation are still a work in progress. Even reading is a mixed bag. Scientific articles were pretty straightforward with the right technical dictionary. And I had a pretty easy time with Albert Camus's L'Étranger. However, I got stuck a chapter or two into Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and while I finished Guy de Maupassant's Pierre et Jean, there were several sections I didn't quite make out.

My most recent accomplishment is finishing the reading of René Daumal's ironically unfinished Le Mont Analogue. Like Bovary, I had to restart it several times. But a few months ago, I decided I was going to finish it. I sat down for about half an hour at a time with several French-English dictionary, and whenever I got stuck, I would consult those. If they failed me, I would use the internet. It took me until this week, as I did not do this daily. But I did it! I have the last of a few appendices added by the editor to this edition, but the novel itself, as well as an outline including the missing chapters, I am through with. Not quite as satisfying as finishing a finished work, but an achievement nonetheless.

The main problem for me with the novel was the sheer amount of, well, novel vocabulary I had to contend with. Analogue Mountain's subtitle is "A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing." It involved a lot of specificities regarding mountains and the climbing thereof, the details of paths and glaciers, natural and supernatural environment, as well as allegories for same. In short, many, many words unfamiliar to me, some of them too technical for my small dictionaries, while others, like péradam, were made up for the novel.

When I ran into a long sentence or several that made use of unfamiliar vocabulary, in order to keep all of them in my mind and make sense of the reading, I had to resort to a tool I usually struggle with - visualization. I found that if I could try and hold, even fleetingly, to the form of, say, Pierre Sogol's bizarre museum of human knowledge, or to the image described in a verse by the poet Alphonse Camard, I could move forward. As hard as that was, holding the separate meanings of the words in my head was harder.

I have subsequently found myself making the effort to visualize when reading fiction in English, as well, with mixed success. In fields where visual reasoning is paramount, I have in the past scribbled or drawn diagrams so that I could have the visualizations in front of me, and give my brain a rest. But maybe it's not too late to teach myself to go without.

Adapting Sherlock Holmes to Perry Mason

After reading Pride and Prejudice I got curious about the issue of entail, which was a main motivator in the story. Briefly, it's a kind of limitation placed on inheritance of an estate which is supposed to make sure that it is not split up - only one person, usually restricted to a male heir, inherits, while everyone else gets nothing. In the novel, this was what made Mrs. Bennet so desperate to find husbands for her daughters, as her husband not having any male heirs, their estate would be inherited by a cousin, and she and her daughters would be destitute once he died.

The institution has been largely abolished since the time of the novel, but I felt that it would be a very interesting motivator in fiction and role-playing scenarios. I then looked at the list of fiction that features this as an issue on the Wikipedia entry, and found a Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Priory School. Reading it, I realized that it would be interesting to try to rewrite it as a Perry Mason story. In the following, I will spoil the Holmes story, which is short, and available online.

Engineering colleges and limits on human power

From my living room, I have a good view of a hill on which stands a college campus. The college is focused on architecture, engineering, and the sciences, although, this being the US, it also offers degrees in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

My undergraduate degrees were conferred by a similar institution, although one where the humanities and social sciences were, for the most part, relegated to a service department. It lies on the side of a mountain - my legs were much stronger when I was forced to climb up and down from classes back then.

Isn't that a bit curious, however? Why is that one college on a hill, why is the other on the side of a mountain? Surely it would be more convenient for the students and faculty if the college were at the same level as the city's downtown, where some of the dorms are, and surely my alma mater would have been much more accessible if it were on a flat surface. These are engineering-dominated colleges - surely if any body would have the knowledge and ability to turn that hill, that slope, into a conveniently flat surface, it would be these.

And yet, there are limits. Despite the fact that humanity is almost defined by its ability to redesign its environment, in practice, often we work with what's in front of us. We will build a road around or over a hill instead of tunneling through, we will accept a given coastline to build along, instead of filling it in or digging it out. When we don't, sometimes we regret it - climate change with its hotter, more acidic, higher sea levels will likely destabilize neighborhoods built on reclaimed land.

We currently live in a world that is full of environments that are close enough to what we can live with that we are able to engineer them to our comfort, or at least, to our survival. When we leave the Earth and try to live in outer space, or in other planets, the whole situation is different. A system's failure doesn't just require us to accept slightly harsher conditions, and maybe retreat to a safer environment - it will likely mean death. We don't even have to go to space - going too far into the ocean is dangerous enough in that sense.

I think we should respect the limits, to understand that we have them. Our imagination may be free, but we should constrain it so that it leads us into improvements of what can be done, not paths forward that might eliminate all of our margins of error.

Pride and Prejudice and being taken in

Since I discussed it last week, I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I enjoyed the experience tremendously, but following the afterglow, I started having second thoughts about my reactions to it.