Last night I finally finished Bleak House, all eight hundred and four pages of it. Certainly a worth way to spend my time. It was quite a great read. The first two hundred of the last three hundred pages or so really move along. After five hundred pages of scene-setting, there are two hundred pages in which so much happens.
There are really some memorable characters, chief among them being Grandfather Smallweed with all his declarations of his senile wife being “a brimstone beast” or warnings to George not to be a “a brimstone magpie” (my favorite). And then there’s Harold Skimpole, a man I would give anything to strangle. Never in a book have I encountered such an ineffably annoying, selfish man. I also really enjoyed Mr. Bucket — a great and unexpected change in opinion. When he’s after Jo, one really hates him. But he turns out to be simply a man with a strong sense of duty, doing what he has to do (or what he feels he has to do) to the utmost of his ability. I came to respect him in the end, which I assume was Dickens’ plan.
There’s something about a Dickens novel, no matter how much I like his corpus as a whole (though I’ve only read four or five of his books as of now), that annoys me. They are, in many ways, predictable. You know that no matter how many characters he introduces and how unrelated they seem to be, they’ll all end up in a tight web by the end of the book, and most of them will turn out to be long lost cousins or brothers to boot. And yet you can’t say that all his novels have unqualified happy endings. In Bleak House Richard dies, as does Lady Dedlock — two characters indispensable to a truly happy ending.
And of course, there’s all the names: Dedlock, Skimpole, Smallweed, etc. Almost every name he chooses is suggestive of the person in some way: remove the “k” and “o” from “Skimpole” and you get “simple,” which is precisely how Skimpole presented himself, though he was far from it. Grandfather Smallweed was a minor (read: small) character but he was something of a pain in the ass most of the book (read: weed). In the end, even when he was being beneficial, he was still self-serving.
Yesterday I had class 4a group b. I think. At any rate, it was the group with Basia in it. Once again, no problems at all out of her. In fact, while I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s a “dream” student, she is usually quite attentive and hard working, and she’s more than willing to speak English in class. She chatters away during activities without reservation. I don’t know what happened that day, but I certainly hope it doesn’t happen again.
Yet it confirms (or it seems to confirm) my method of handling it — give the student space and the benefit of the doubt and let everything work itself out. I did that with Marcin (4a) to some degree. I talked to him, making it clear that I wasn’t going to take shit from him and that how I treated him depended solely on how he treated me. He’s still something of a pain in the ass, but he’s not as bad as he was on those particular days.
Today marks the close of yet another month here. This would make about my thirty-seventh month in Poland. And almost the end of another year.
Time is only accelerating. I haven’t really written about time in so long; haven’t plopped down to moan about how it’s been “x years since thus and such happened and I can’t believe it’s been that long” in quite a while. I guess I could scour my journal and determine how many years it’s been since I was last obsessed with how many years it’s been . . . but I won’t. I’m not where I thought I would be when I was obsessed with time, though. Enough said.