What is new with Eric? Well, the Torrens Twins, my entry in the Fantasy Baseball League of Hennepin County, are trying to be more than an also-ran, but an injury to Ian Kinsler and the prolonged slump of Jason Bay, now also hobbled, are holding them back. What to do? I thought I had made a shrewd move by picking up Jarod Washburn just before the division-leading Tigers acquired him in a trade, but I see that tonight he got beat up by the Orioles.
On coffee breaks and in bed I read Bleak House and am now almost to the end. At Caribou this afternoon Mr. Jarndyce stepped back so that Woodcourt could step forward, thereby clearing the way for Esther's bliss. Such is the goodness and purity of Jarndyce that I have to suspect that the thirty or so pages in the 900s of my Penguin Classic paperback will relate yet more of his magnanimous acts. But what was going on between him and Esther, all that "little woman" and "my Guardian" between people engaged to be married? Even allowing for different courtship customs this one seems odd. I see now, turning to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, that his discussion of Bleak House includes a section headed "John Jarndyce's Curious Courtship" wherein he advances the theory that Jarndyce, who is perhaps 30 years older than Esther, proposes that their marriage be platonic--that is what he means by repeatedly insisting that "nothing can change" and stressing that on this "one point" she must be "quite certain." In this light it seems possible to criticize old kindly Jarndyce, since under the terms of his proposal Esther, who is really not in a position to turn him down, will be denied children as well as any lover. The whole thing is very strange and makes you wonder just how badly disfigured Esther had been by the smallpox, another topic on which Dickens seems to equivocate.
In her column today Miss Manners alludes to Bleak House--to Mrs. Jellyby, in particular, in whose honor she names the Jellyby Syndrome, a condition in which "those who work on behalf of other people in general feel free to annoy the particular people with whom they come into contact." I have elsewhere published my admiration for Miss Manners.
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