February 4, 2005
Life in Hell
10:15 AM
"Same Words, Different Worlds: Harriet Martineau’s Quiet Subversion of Charles Dickens’s Criteria for Household Words in 'The Ghost that Appeared to Mrs. Wharton.'" 1,708 words, 5 drafts, 12 hours. I feel the force is strong in me.
Here's the epigraph that I used:
When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. [...] All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
– George Orwell. Politics of the English Language. 1946.