I’m currently reading Barbara Freese’s Coal: A Human History and have just come across this passage, which follows a discussion of the coal miners’ strikes at the turn of the last century:
The 1902 strike was also a vivid lesson in how dependent the nation was on coal, and how deeply it could be hurt when supplies ran short. Even after the strike was settled, it was months before coal supplies and prices were back to normal, and some communities experienced great hardship. In January 1903, three hundred citizens of the town of Arcola, Illinois, politely mugged a coal train that broke down there on its way to Chicago. No coal had been delivered to Arcola for a month, half of its citizens were out of coal, and businesses had been closed for a week. When the railroad refused to sell its coal to the town, the good citizens simply surrounded the train with their wagons, climbed up onto the coal cars, and began shoveling. Active members of the raid included the town’s two bank presidents, two ministers, and a police officer. One of the bank presidents kept a careful accounting of the amount taken by each person so that payment could later be made.
What a deftly amusing description! One can picture the bank presidents and ministers, models of propriety and rectitude amid the orderly anarchy of the citizens’ self-help. And that phrase: “politely mugged” – that’s a gem.
So, what passages would you like to share?
“Vittorio Malvora!” I called, my voice ringing with wrath in the echoing cavern. “Madrigal Raith! I am Harry Dresden, Warden of the White Council of Wizards. Under the Unseelie Accords, I accuse you of murder in a time of peace, and challenge you, here and now, before these witnesses, to trial by combat.” I slammed my staff down again in another shock of thunder, and Hellfire flooded the runes of the staff. “To the death .”
Utter silence fell on the Deeps.
Damn, there ain’t nothing like a good entrance.
From White Night ; I’m re-reading the Harry Dresden novels at the moment.
One of the books I’m reading right now is Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays , edited by Mark Rose. This gem comes from C. S. Lewis’s On Science Fiction ; in it he so very neatly describes and dismisses much of the hostility toward science fiction as a genre – and by extension, fantastic fiction or other speculative fiction as well:
If we were all on board ship and there was trouble among the stewards, I can just conceive their chief spokesman looking with disfavour on anyone who stole away from the fierce debates in the saloon or pantry to take a breather on deck. For up there, he would taste the salt, he would see the vastness of the water, he would remember that the ship had a whither and a whence. He would remember things like fog, storms, and ice. What had seemed, in the hot, lighted rooms down below to be merely the scene for a political crisis, would appear once more as a tiny egg-shell moving rapidly through an immense darkness over an element in which man cannot live. It would not necessarily change his convictions about the rights and wrongs of the dispute down below, but it would probably show them in a new light. It could hardly fail to remind him that the stewards were taking for granted hopes more momentous that that of a rise in pay, and the passengers forgetting dangers more serious than that of having to cook and serve their own meals.
Stories of the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. They are as refreshing as that passage in E. M. Forster where the man, looking at the monkeys, realises that most of the inhabitants of India do not care how India is governed. Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape.’ I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.
Emphasis and paragraph break mine.
It’s a wonderful essay, and one of the many reasons that C. S. Lewis remains one of my favorite writers of all time. As it happens, you can read the full essay on Google Books . I highly recommend it.
friedo
March 17, 2010, 1:03am
5
From Anathem , by Neal Stephenson:
That about sums it up.
"He carried her to the bed. It was like two tornados competing for the same trailer park’’–T. Jefferson Parker, “L. A. Outlaws”
A Lost King by Raymond DeCapite. Paul is telling his father he’s just gotten a job.
“Sometimes a customer praises you to the manager. When it happens the manager puts a gold star by your name. And when you get a lot of stars he calls you in.”
“What happens?”
“What happens? He showers you with stars and gives you a kiss. What do you think happens? He promotes you.”
From my audiobook, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie.
Rowdy has protected me since we were born.
Marvelous. Thanks!