A nail through the head

In Jack Vance's novel "Emphyrio", evil alien invaders execute the eponymous hero—who wanted to contact them in order to talk peace—by driving a nail through his head. For an author so disdainful of religion as Vance, the scene is remarkably Passion-like (as with the Passion, the death of Emphyrio is theatrically reenacted within the world of the novel).

The Old Testament features an example of death by nail through the head. Yael received Sisera into her house with feigned hopitality after the latter's armies were routed, only to push a tent peg through his temples when he laid asleep.

I'm not very partial to Yael's form of heroism. Its sneakiness precludes bravery, while still not requiring any particular cunning. You only need a modicum of hand-eye coodination, really. And slaughtering your guest in his sleep is unbecoming. At least Judith had to take the effort of infiltrating Holofernes' camp and seducing him.

Another example of these low-effort heroines is the portuguese Brites de Almeida, a baker who discovered in her furnace spanish soldiers seeking refuge from their defeat at Albujarrota, and dispatched them in a manner which almost suggested itself, given the circunstances. You have to admit that lighting a furnace and waiting for the screams to subside hardly constitutes the apex of heroic achievement.

Maybe I'm being parochial, but I much prefer local heroine María Pita, who helped defend A Coruña against the forces of Sir Francis Drake.

(later) Either I misremembered or there are several versions of Brites' legend. Internet says that she didn't bake the poor chaps, but instead silenced them forever by applying a number of vigorous shovel strikes. That's better I guess, but still not as meritorious a deed as besting a son of Albion in the throes of a honest-to-God battle like María Pita did.

reading while walking (3)

From Steven R. Fischer's A History of Reading:

The physical act of reading was anything but easy in the Middle Ages. This discouraged many.

Scribes often noted in the margins of their manuscripts the physical discomfort of reading and writing in dark, cold, draughty scriptoria. As one Florencio protested in the middle of the thirteenth century: "It is a painful task. It extinguishing the light from the eyes, it bends the back, it crushes the viscera and the ribs, it brings forth pain to the kidneys, and weariness to the whole body."

I hear you, Florencio.

What are examples of literary characters who got some kind of physical disability because of their excessive reading? Don Quixote doesn't count because it was the semantic content of the books he read what did him in. I'm thinking more among the lines of Clym Yeobright from Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, who ended up damaging his eyesight.

Also, are there accounts of members of a preliterate culture encountering for the first time a person engaged in reading? It must have seemed a puzzling and inscrutable activity...

reading while riding

Abraham Lincoln did it, at least judging from this equestrian statue:

John Wesley was also in the habit of reading while on horseback. In a journal entry for March 21, 1770 he writes:

Nearly thirty years ago, I was thinking, "How is it that no horse ever stumbles while I am reading?" (History, poetry, and philosophy, I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times.)

Myself, I would read while mounted on a camel and maybe even on a donkey, but not on a horse. It seems too unstable!

It must be an odd experience to read the Houyhnhnm section of Gulliver's Travels while on horseback.

reading while walking (2)

Today I saw a gentleman strolling undaunted around the park, book in hand, reading. He didn't seem to bump into benches, statues, or other people, and appeared to avoid ditches just fine. I guess the activity is not as risky as I supposed from passages like the following:

Ibn al-Abanusi reported that al-Khatib used to read while walking. This is a common habit among hadith masters. [...] The philologist imam Tha`lab (200-291) died one day after he was hit by a running horse while walking and reading at the same time as narrated by al-`Askari in al-Hathth `ala Talab al-`Ilm (p. 77).

In the city Oviedo there's a statue of a girl who is reading while walking. It's called Esperanza Caminando:

One can also read while on a treadmill, although to my mind it lacks charm compared to reading while walking outdoors:

When I last spoke with him, by telephone to his hospital bed, Adrian's warmth and sense of humor were undiminished. I told him that Arion Press was beginning the printing of James Joyce's Ulysses, and he replied that he had read that immense novel while walking on a treadmill. That was back in the forties, he said, while he was serving out his term of alternate service as a conscientious objector and had been assigned to a medical experiment.

(source)

The Ascian language

In The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe imagined a language called Ascian. Its speakers have very little grammatical leeway when producing speech. In fact, they may only choose from among a limited list of possible utterances which have been "approved" by a ruling, crushingly totalitarian camarilla. Those are the only valid utterances in the language. Some examples:

The people meeting in counsel may judge, but no one is to receive more than a hundred blows.

One is strong, another beautiful, a third a cunning artificer. Which is best? He who serves the populace.

The citizen renders to the populace what is due to the populace. What is due to the populace? Everything.

It's like Orwell's Newspeak carried to the ultimate limit. Not only particular words and concepts are prohibited, but linguistic creativity itself. Still, the novel recounts how an ascian captured in battle is able (with the help of an interpreter) to tell a story that criticizes the ruling camarilla. Gene Wolfe seems to be rebuking the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: even in the most restricted of languages, you can find workarounds to communicate (or at least insinuate) any idea you want. On the other hand, the story may have been more the product of the interpreter than of the ascian himself...

I was reminded of the Ascian language when I read the Wikipedia page for Lexis. Apparently, we too employ formulaic language most of the time:

The major finding of this research is that language users rely to a very high extent on ready-made language “lexical chunks”, which can be easily combined to form sentences. This eliminates the need for the speaker to analyze each sentence grammatically, yet deals with a situation effectively. Typical examples include “I see what you mean” or “Could you please hand me the …” or “Recent research shows that…”

Language usage, on the other hand, is what takes place when the ready-made chunks do not fulfill the speaker’s immediate needs; in other words, a new sentence is about to be formed and must be analyzed for correctness. Grammar rules have been internalized by native speakers, allowing them to determine the viability of new sentences. Language usage might be defined as a fall-back position when all other options have been exhausted.