#27 My favourite Passage

Haha. Oh pun, you will never fail to amuse me. If you don't understand, then let me speed you up - I just want to talk a bit about "A Passage to India" for a little while (get it now?). It's the text we are studying for our next Lit SAC and consequentially, our exam (assuming I choose this text when we get to that point.)

Now as I've probably mentioned before, this is a difficult novel to read. Why? Well for many reasons. It would be hard to go into it without you guys knowing the text (do you? Let me know =] ). Anyway, there is this one passage that has fast become one of my favourite passages ever. It's just beautiful. It's when Forster is describing Chandrapore, and he moves on to describe the sky (which he comes back to often):

The sky too has its changes, but they are less marked than those of the vegetation and the river. Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference - orange melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault. The distance between the vault and them is as nothing to the distance behind them, and that farther distance, though beyond colour, last freed itself from blue.

One day I will write something as amazing as that. Or at least, I hope I will.


Anyway, someone asked for more French stories, so OKAY!

Here's a bizarre story that doesn't really have an interesting conclusion, it's rather one of those tales that drift off in an awkward silence. But I just found it hilarious.

The classes I had to attend in France were either Science, Maths, French or English (English was by far my easiest/best subject while I was there...). The problem with Science, Maths and French, was that, with the first two, I can't even understand them when they are in English. Let alone some old French bird standing at the front of the class, holding up a tennis ball and speaking in some rapid, incoherent (to my petite ears) language while I stared blankly back (I think it was, um, geometry?). Then I discovered that no one really cared what I did in class, so I just read, and then after our two week break, I wrote (even though by then, my listening had improved enough that I could understand what people were talking about as long as I understood the context).

So perhaps in the early second week, I was sitting in Biology, book in hand, a faint drone of French in the hazy background. I was far too immersed in The Bell Jar to notice my name being called the first time, so I had to have my shoulder tapped by the teacher herself, so as draw me out of my stupor. I looked up, slightly confused, and heard the teacher say, " 'Ow iz it that yohu sai "sex-appeal" en Anglias?"

I was slightly confused, as generally, this is not a question thata teacher would ask a student. Apparently two students were flirting and the teacher felt a need to ask the boy whether he thought the girl had sex appeal. And then, because there was an Australian in the class, they asked her what it was in English. Then, I was asked to get up and write it on the board.

For the remainder of the lesson I sat there, again reading, but occasionally looking up and staring in amazement at the words sitting rather prominently on the black board.

Stereo-typical French, anyone?