Female infidelity is a rather complex phenomenon. First, with the social ...
Bill Bryson
Short story everyday life and private life
Jess and Wyatt
Introduction
Some time after we moved to former house English parish priest in an idyllic but faceless village in Norfolk, I went up to the attic to see where the source of the mysterious leak was unexpectedly discovered. Since there is no attic staircase in our house, we had to use a high stepladder to wriggle for a long time and indecently, to crawl into the ceiling hatch - which is why I didn’t go there before (and then I didn’t feel much enthusiasm from such excursions).
When I finally climbed into the attic and somehow got to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to find a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me into a tiny space on the roof, slightly larger than a regular table top, between the front and rear gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural absurdities, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was it necessary to make a door where there was no obvious need for it? However, there was a wonderful view from the platform.
When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unfamiliar angle, it is always fascinating. I was fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk, this height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. There was an old stone church right in front of me (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, a little downhill, at some distance from the church and the pastor's house, there is a village, to which both of these buildings belonged. On the other side was Wymondham Abbey, a mass of medieval opulence that dominated the southern skyline. Halfway to the abbey, in the field, a tractor rumbled, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was serene and sweet English pastoral.
It was especially interesting for me to look around, because just yesterday I was wandering around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired, and before that was a county archaeologist and probably knew the history and landscapes of Norfolk better than anyone else. However, he never visited our village church and really wanted to look at this beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame Cathedral, and about the same age as the cathedrals in Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches - as many as 659 pieces (their number per square mile here is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention.
Have you ever noticed, ”Brian asked as we entered the churchyard,“ that village churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground? - The building of the church really stood in a shallow lowland, like a load on a pillow; the foundation of the church was about three feet below the surrounding church cemetery. - Do you know why?
I confessed, as was often the case in Brian's company, that I had no idea.
It's not that the church is sinking, ”Brian explained with a smile. - This is the church cemetery rising. How many people do you think are buried here?
I scanned the gravestones with an appraising glance:
Do not know. Eighty people? Hundred?
In my opinion you a little understating, ”Brian said with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that over a century, about a thousand adults die, plus several thousand little poor fellows who have not had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the construction of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty and not a hundred dead, but twenty thousand.
(All this, as we remember, takes place a step from my front door.)
- Twenty thousand? I asked in amazement.
My friend nodded calmly.
Yes, that's a lot. This is why the ground has risen three feet. He paused a little, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: “There are a thousand parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that before us is a significant part of material culture. - He swept his hand around the bell towers towering in the distance: - From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are looking now at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in the quietness of the countryside, where there have never been serious cataclysms.
From what Brian said, it became clear to me why archaeologists find 27,000 antiques a year in pastoral and sparsely populated Norfolk - more than in any other county in England.
People lost things here long before England became England. Brian once showed me a map of archaeological finds in our parish. Something has been found in almost every field - Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age burials, Viking manors. In 1985, a farmer walking through a field discovered a rare Roman phallic pendant near the very border of our domain.
I imagine a man in a toga standing very close to my site; he bewilderedly pats himself from top to bottom, discovering that he has lost a valuable piece of jewelry; just think: his pendant lay in the ground for seventeen or eighteen centuries, survived endless generations of people engaged in a wide variety of activities, the invasions of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans, the birth of the English nation, the development of the monarchy and everything else, before he was picked up by a farmer at the end of the 20th century, for sure quite surprised by such an unusual find!
So, standing on the roof of my own house and looking at the unexpectedly opened landscape, I was amazed at the strangeness of our existence: after two thousand years of human activity, the only reminder of outside world remains a Roman phallic pendant. Century after century, people quietly did their daily routines - eating, sleeping, having sex, having fun, and I suddenly thought that history, in essence, consists of such ordinary things. Even Einstein spent most of his intellectual life thinking about a vacation, a new hammock, or the graceful leg of a young lady getting off a tram across the street. These things fill our lives and thoughts, but we do not attach serious importance to them. I don’t know how many hours I spent at school studying the Missouri Compromise or the War of the Scarlet and White Rose, but I would never have been allowed to devote the same amount of time to food history, sleep history, sex, or entertainment.
I thought it might be interesting: write a book about the ordinary things we deal with all the time, finally notice them and pay tribute to them. Looking around my house, I realized with fear and some confusion how little I knew about the world of everyday life around me. One afternoon, when I was sitting at the kitchen table and mechanically twirling a salt shaker and a pepper shaker in my hands, I suddenly wondered: why, in fact, with all the variety of spices and seasonings, we revere these two so much? Why not pepper and cardamom or, say, salt and cinnamon? And why does the fork have four prongs, and not three or five? There must be some explanation for such things.
As I got dressed, I wondered why all my jackets have a few useless buttons on each sleeve. On the radio, they were talking about someone who “paid for housing and a table,” and I was surprised: what kind of table are they talking about? Suddenly my house seemed like a mysterious place to me.
And then I decided to go on a trip around the house: walk through all the rooms and understand what role each of them played in the evolution of private life. The bathroom tells the story of hygiene, the kitchen tells the story of cooking, the bedroom tells the story of sex, death and sleep, and so on. I will write the history of the world without leaving my home!
I admit, I liked the idea. I recently finished a book in which I tried to comprehend the universe and how it was formed - the task, frankly, was not an easy one. Therefore, I thought with pleasure of such a clearly circumscribed, limitless object of description, like the old pastor's house in the English countryside. Yes, this book can easily be composed in slippers!
But it was not there. The house is an astonishingly complex object. To my great surprise, I discovered that whatever happens in the world - discoveries, creations, victories, defeats - all their fruits eventually end up in our homes one way or another. War, famine, industrial revolution, the Enlightenment - you will find traces of them in your sofas and dressers, in the folds of curtains, in the softness of down pillows, in the paint on the walls and in the water flowing from the tap. The history of everyday life is not just the history of beds, cabinets and stoves, as I vaguely assumed earlier, it is the history of scurvy, guano, the Eiffel Tower, bed bugs, the abduction of dead bodies, as well as almost everything else that has ever taken place in a human life. Home is not a refuge from history. Home is where history ultimately leads.
Bill Bryson
A brief history of everyday life and private life
Jess and Wyatt
Introduction
Sometime after we moved into the former home of an English parish priest in an idyllic but featureless village in Norfolk, I went up to the attic to see where the mysterious leak came from. Since there is no attic staircase in our house, we had to use a high stepladder to wriggle for a long time and indecently, to crawl into the ceiling hatch - which is why I didn’t go there before (and then I didn’t feel much enthusiasm from such excursions).
When I finally climbed into the attic and somehow got to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to find a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me into a tiny space on the roof, slightly larger than a regular table top, between the front and rear gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural absurdities, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was it necessary to make a door where there was no obvious need for it? However, there was a wonderful view from the platform.
When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unfamiliar angle, it is always fascinating. I was fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk, this height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. There was an old stone church right in front of me (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, a little downhill, at some distance from the church and the pastor's house, there is a village, to which both of these buildings belonged. On the other side was Wymondham Abbey, a mass of medieval opulence that dominated the southern skyline. Halfway to the abbey, in the field, a tractor rumbled, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was serene and sweet English pastoral.
It was especially interesting for me to look around, because just yesterday I was wandering around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired, and before that was a county archaeologist and probably knew the history and landscapes of Norfolk better than anyone else. However, he never visited our village church and really wanted to look at this beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame Cathedral, and about the same age as the cathedrals in Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches - as many as 659 pieces (their number per square mile here is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention.
Have you ever noticed, ”Brian asked as we entered the churchyard,“ that village churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground? - The building of the church really stood in a shallow lowland, like a load on a pillow; the foundation of the church was about three feet below the surrounding church cemetery. - Do you know why?
I confessed, as was often the case in Brian's company, that I had no idea.
It's not that the church is sinking, ”Brian explained with a smile. - This is the church cemetery rising. How many people do you think are buried here?
I scanned the gravestones with an appraising glance:
Do not know. Eighty people? Hundred?
In my opinion you a little understating, ”Brian said with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that over a century, about a thousand adults die, plus several thousand little poor fellows who have not had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the construction of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty and not a hundred dead, but twenty thousand.
(All this, as we remember, takes place a step from my front door.)
- Twenty thousand? I asked in amazement.
My friend nodded calmly.
Yes, that's a lot. This is why the ground has risen three feet. He paused a little, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: “There are a thousand parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that before us is a significant part of material culture. - He swept his hand around the bell towers towering in the distance: - From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are looking now at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in the quietness of the countryside, where there have never been serious cataclysms.
A juicy story filled with rare facts about the things that have surrounded the British for centuries. Chapter titles: Kitchen, Basement, Study, Garden, Staircase, Bedroom, Bathroom, Dressing Room, Nursery, Attic, etc. Theme USA pops up periodically in the book, since technical innovations could come in England it is from there, and indeed in front of us - an overview of Western civilization. There was a place in the book for Columbus and Karl Marx, furniture maker Thomas Chippendale and architect John Nash, famous eccentrics, linguistic research and much more. Is it true that Stonehenge in the 19th century had to be rescued from barbarian tourists? How many slaves did the 3rd US President Thomas Jefferson have? As if you are listening to a lecture by Evgeny Zharinov, Leonid Matsikh or Natalia Basovskaya, it is very entertaining. At the same time, the author does not fall into musi-pushi-flirting with the reader. Recently I encountered something similar: I opened the much-praised "Evropeana" by Patrick Ourzhednik and just threw up his hands - written by a schoolboy for schoolchildren, a set of platitudes.
Bryson's book has analogues, which is not surprising, because England is a very popular topic:
Dittrich T. - Everyday life Victorian England - 2007
Morton G.- London. Walks in the capital of the world - Russian edition 2009
Ovchinnikov V.V.- Oak roots. Impressions and reflections on England and the British
Picard L.- Victorian London - Russian edition 2011
Worsley L.- English house. An Intimate Story - Russian Edition 2016
___________________
The most common remedy was opiates, mainly in the form of an opium tincture, but even the highest doses could not numb the severe pain.
Amputation of a limb usually lasted less than a minute, so the most excruciating pain was not too long, but then the doctor had to bandage the vessels and suture the wound, and this also had to be endured. I had to work quickly. In 1658, Samuel Pips had a kidney stone removed; it took the surgeon only fifty seconds to reach the kidney, find and carve a stone the size of a tennis ball (meaning a 17th century tennis ball, which was much smaller than modern, but still not very tiny). Pips was lucky, Lisa Picard notes, because the surgeon operated on him first that day and his instruments were relatively clean. Despite the speed of the operation, it took Pips more than a month to recover. Now it is difficult to understand how the patients endured the wild pain during more complex operations.
* * *
Contrary to its title, The Book of Household Management covers the stated topic in just twenty-three pages, with the next nine hundred devoted to cooking. However, despite this obvious bias towards cooking, Mrs. Beaton did not like to stand at the stove and tried, as far as possible, not even close to her own kitchen. To guess this, it is enough to skim through her recipes. For example, Mrs Beaton recommends boiling pasta for one hour and forty-five minutes. Like many people of her origin and generation, she harbored an innate distrust of anything exotic. Mango fruits, she writes, are liked only by "those who have no prejudice against turpentine." Lobsters, in her opinion, are "very indigestible" and "not nearly as nutritious as people think." She considered garlic "provocative", potatoes - suspicious, since "many root crops have a narcotic effect and many of them are poisonous."
Bill bryson
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
Translated from English by Tatiana Trefilova
Bill Bryson is the world's bestselling author, A Brief History of Almost Everything. After the phenomenal success of this book devoted to "big" problems - the birth of the Universe, the development of the planet Earth, the origin of life - he decided to focus on seemingly smaller issues that, nevertheless, are extremely close to most of us: on the history of private life, everyday life and home comfort. The story of everyday little things and household items turns into a historical narrative that takes us into the deep past of human culture.
ISBN 978-5-17-083335-1
What can be read about England and the British? About culture, traditions? Recommend the best books about Great Britain, England, mentality, about the peculiarities of the national character. Can you get used to England? Should I move to England?? Great Britain Why did Britain leave the European Union? Help me find! What are some good books about England? Island mentality - these strange Englishmen - list of books - download - read. The most important thing is where to find out
“A Brief History of Everyday Life and Private Life”, of course, is not at all short - 640 pages in medium-sized type - but fascinating from the first letter to the last. It would seem that nothing special: facts and stories related to household use. However, the storyteller's love for detail, his presentation of information, and the fluidity of his presentation make a popular science book extremely enjoyable to read. “A Brief History ...” is a kind of antipode to yet another scientific pop, “Pinball effect”, which I did not like for the fragmentation of information and the author's rushing from one subject to another. Here, the stories are remembered - however, some of them are also repeated, which is a little annoying.
The house is an astonishingly complex object. To my great surprise, I discovered that whatever happens in the world - discoveries, creations, victories, defeats - all their fruits eventually end up in our homes one way or another. War, famine, industrial revolution, the Enlightenment - you will find traces of them in your sofas and dressers, in the folds of curtains, in the softness of down pillows, in the paint on the walls and in the water flowing from the tap. The history of everyday life is not just the history of beds, cabinets and stoves, as I vaguely assumed earlier, it is the history of scurvy, guano, the Eiffel Tower, bed bugs, the abduction of dead bodies, as well as almost everything else that has ever taken place in a human life. Home is not a refuge from history. Home is where history ultimately leads.
Bryson takes the former home of the English parish priest in the village of Norfolk as a basis and travels through the rooms: hall, kitchen, pantry and pantry, switchboard, living room, dining room, basement, corridor, study, garden, "plum room", stairs, bedroom, bathroom, dressing room, nursery, attic. For almost every piece of furniture, he has a long story with a bias in previous centuries. Table? Well, for example: a simple board used to serve as a dining table, which was placed on the lap of the diner, and then hung on the wall again - since then the word board has come to mean not only the surface on which they eat, but also the food itself. Bed? Medieval materials for stuffing mattresses can be discussed at length and in detail. And behind the salt shaker and pepper shaker, there is a train of the most bloody and terrible stories. And here is a noteworthy description of how the ritual of tea drinking came into being in the British Empire:
From 1699 to 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from £ 13,000 to nearly £ 1.2 million, and quadrupled over the next thirty years. The workers sipped tea noisily and the ladies sipped elegantly. It was served for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It was the first drink in history that did not belong to any particular class and, moreover, had its own ritual drinking time, called the tea drinking. It was easier to make tea at home than coffee, and it went especially well with another pleasant component that suddenly became available to middle-class citizens - sugar. The British, like no other nation, are addicted to sweet tea with milk. For a century and a half, tea was the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was the heart of the British Empire.
Not everyone liked the tea right away. The poet Robert Southey talked about a certain country lady who received a pound of tea as a gift from her city friend, when this drink was still a novelty. Not knowing what to do with it, she boiled it in a saucepan, put the leaves on sandwiches with butter and salt, and served it to the guests. They bravely chewed on the unusual treat, claiming that it tasted interesting, albeit somewhat strange. However, in places where they drank tea with sugar, everyone was happy.
The author, however, from time to time leaves for areas that are not too closely related to everyday life. For example, talking about comfort, he talks about the Neolithic settlement of Skara Bray, and in the chapter about the garden he talks about the problem of burials. However, all themes turn out to be reinforced concretely interconnected: private life is not only a house, it is also a person. And about cemeteries in England in the 19th century. it is no less interesting to read than about the history of furniture.
... The cemeteries were so crowded that it was almost impossible to dig the earth with a shovel and not accidentally pick up someone's decomposing hand or other part of the body. The dead were buried in shallow hastily dug graves, and they were often in sight - dug up by animals, or they themselves rose to the surface, as is the case with stones in flower beds. In such cases, the deceased had to be reburied.
The townspeople who mourned their deceased loved ones almost never visited their graves and did not attend the funeral itself. It was too hard and dangerous too. It was said that putrid smells frighten off visitors. A certain doctor Walker testified in the parliamentary investigation that the gravediggers, before disturbing the coffin, drilled a hole in it, inserted a tube into it and burned the escaping gases - this process took up to twenty minutes.
Dr. Walker personally knew one person who neglected this safety measure and immediately fell, "struck like a cannonball, poisoned by gases from a fresh grave." "If this gas is inhaled, not mixed with ambient air, there will be instant death," the committee confirmed in a written report, adding grimly: "Although even mixed with air, it leads to serious illness, usually ending in death."
“A Brief History…” is good for everyone except for one thing: there is no list of sources. Bryson, of course, points out here and there monographs and works from where he got the facts, and my fragmentary knowledge of some subjects suggests that his information is reliable, but it's still a little strange to see stories without reference to the original data. Of course, if you attach a footnote to every detail, then the book will double and become completely unreadable, but a list of at least the main literature in which the author excavated would be desirable.
On the whole, “A Brief History of Everyday Life and Private Life” is incredibly informative and useful - for science pop it is relatively easy to perceive, without losing its nutritional qualities. So let your curiosity unfold: learn the history of various foods and home furnishings, be horrified at the plight of medieval servants, and read about past misconceptions about women and sex.
Sometime after we moved into the former home of an English parish priest in an idyllic but featureless village in Norfolk, I went up to the attic to see where the mysterious leak came from. Since there is no attic staircase in our house, we had to use a high stepladder to wriggle for a long time and indecently, to crawl into the ceiling hatch - which is why I didn’t go there before (and then I didn’t feel much enthusiasm from such excursions).
When I finally climbed into the attic and somehow got to my feet in the dusty darkness, I was surprised to find a secret door in the outer wall, which was not visible from the yard. The door opened easily and led me into a tiny space on the roof, slightly larger than a regular table top, between the front and rear gables. Victorian houses are often a collection of architectural absurdities, but this one seemed completely incomprehensible: why was it necessary to make a door where there was no obvious need for it? However, there was a wonderful view from the platform.
When you suddenly see a familiar world from an unfamiliar angle, it is always fascinating. I was fifty feet above the ground; in central Norfolk, this height already guarantees a more or less panoramic view. There was an old stone church right in front of me (our house once served as an addition to it). Further, a little downhill, at some distance from the church and the pastor's house, there is a village, to which both of these buildings belonged. On the other side was Wymondham Abbey, a mass of medieval opulence that dominated the southern skyline. Halfway to the abbey, in the field, a tractor rumbled, drawing straight lines on the ground. The rest of the landscape was serene and sweet English pastoral.
It was especially interesting for me to look around, because just yesterday I was wandering around these places with my friend Brian Ayres. Brian had recently retired, and before that was a county archaeologist and probably knew the history and landscapes of Norfolk better than anyone else. However, he never visited our village church and really wanted to look at this beautiful old building, older than Notre Dame Cathedral, and about the same age as the cathedrals in Chartres and Salisbury. However, Norfolk is full of medieval churches - as many as 659 pieces (their number per square mile here is the largest in the world), so they do not attract too much attention.
Have you ever noticed, ”Brian asked as we entered the churchyard,“ that village churches almost always seem to be buried in the ground? - The building of the church really stood in a shallow lowland, like a load on a pillow; the foundation of the church was about three feet below the surrounding church cemetery. - Do you know why?
I confessed, as was often the case in Brian's company, that I had no idea.
It's not that the church is sinking, ”Brian explained with a smile. - This is the church cemetery rising. How many people do you think are buried here?
I scanned the gravestones with an appraising glance:
Do not know. Eighty people? Hundred?
In my opinion you a little understating, ”Brian said with good-natured equanimity. - Think yourself. Such a rural parish has an average of 250 people, which means that over a century, about a thousand adults die, plus several thousand little poor fellows who have not had time to grow up. Multiply this by the number of centuries that have passed since the construction of this church, and you will see that there are not eighty and not a hundred dead, but twenty thousand.
(All this, as we remember, takes place a step from my front door.)
- Twenty thousand? I asked in amazement.
My friend nodded calmly.
Yes, that's a lot. This is why the ground has risen three feet. He paused a little, giving me time to digest the information, then continued: “There are a thousand parishes in Norfolk. Multiply all these centuries of human activity by a thousand, and it turns out that before us is a significant part of material culture. - He swept his hand around the bell towers towering in the distance: - From here you can see ten or twelve other parishes, so in fact you are looking now at a quarter of a million burials - and this is here, in the quietness of the countryside, where there have never been serious cataclysms.
From what Brian said, it became clear to me why archaeologists find 27,000 antiques a year in pastoral and sparsely populated Norfolk - more than in any other county in England.
People lost things here long before England became England. Brian once showed me a map of archaeological finds in our parish. Something has been found in almost every field - Neolithic tools, Roman coins and pottery, Saxon brooches, Bronze Age burials, Viking manors. In 1985, a farmer walking through a field discovered a rare Roman phallic pendant near the very border of our domain.
I imagine a man in a toga standing very close to my site; he bewilderedly pats himself from top to bottom, discovering that he has lost a valuable piece of jewelry; just think: his pendant lay in the ground for seventeen or eighteen centuries, survived endless generations of people engaged in a wide variety of activities, the invasions of the Saxons, Vikings and Normans, the birth of the English nation, the development of the monarchy and everything else, before he was picked up by a farmer at the end of the 20th century, for sure quite surprised by such an unusual find!
So, standing on the roof of my own house and looking at the unexpectedly opened landscape, I was amazed at the strangeness of our life: after two thousand years of human activity, the only reminder of the outside world is the Roman phallic pendant. Century after century, people quietly did their daily routines - eating, sleeping, having sex, having fun, and I suddenly thought that history, in essence, consists of such ordinary things. Even Einstein spent most of his intellectual life thinking about a vacation, a new hammock, or the graceful leg of a young lady getting off a tram across the street. These things fill our lives and thoughts, but we do not attach serious importance to them. I don’t know how many hours I spent at school studying the Missouri Compromise or the War of the Scarlet and White Rose, but I would never have been allowed to devote the same amount of time to food history, sleep history, sex, or entertainment.
I thought it might be interesting: write a book about the ordinary things we deal with all the time, finally notice them and pay tribute to them. Looking around my house, I realized with fear and some confusion how little I knew about the world of everyday life around me. One afternoon, when I was sitting at the kitchen table and mechanically twirling a salt shaker and a pepper shaker in my hands, I suddenly wondered: why, in fact, with all the variety of spices and seasonings, we revere these two so much? Why not pepper and cardamom or, say, salt and cinnamon? And why does the fork have four prongs, and not three or five? There must be some explanation for such things.
As I got dressed, I wondered why all my jackets have a few useless buttons on each sleeve. On the radio, they were talking about someone who “paid for housing and a table,” and I was surprised: what kind of table are they talking about? Suddenly my house seemed like a mysterious place to me.
And then I decided to go on a trip around the house: walk through all the rooms and understand what role each of them played in the evolution of private life. The bathroom tells the story of hygiene, the kitchen tells the story of cooking, the bedroom tells the story of sex, death and sleep, and so on. I will write the history of the world without leaving my home!
I admit, I liked the idea. I recently finished a book in which I tried to comprehend the universe and how it was formed - the task, frankly, was not an easy one. Therefore, I thought with pleasure of such a clearly circumscribed, limitless object of description, like the old pastor's house in the English countryside. Yes, this book can easily be composed in slippers!
