TMWWT-Chapter Eleven

The Criminals Chase the Police

Great lines: ...but if he were walking with them...by God! I believe this ground would shake...

This reminds me of how sweet it was to have the high school students reading "The Surprise" at our drama class. The teens were reluctant to say "by God!" and substituted "my gosh" and "darn" for the other word. I hadn't noticed the minor swearing in the play until reading it with the students, and I thought really how interesting it was that they were so sensitive to this.

More great lines: ...we are not much, my boy, in Sunday's universe...
...the world in which he had been moving for three days...where men took off their beards...their spectacles and their noses...and turned into other people...
...what was a friend...what an enemy...
...Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten...
...you've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor....the poor really has a stake in the country...(that's so true)
...Sunday would stand perfectly helpless before the task of converting any ordinary healthy person anywhere...
...ritual refreshment...
...it is just as well to see a good man or two when one is possibly near to death...
...the last honest stranger whom he should ever see upon the earth...

Memorable: The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists...

Great conversation: "Mr. Syme is saying," called out Ratcliffe to the French Colonel, "that this man, at least, will never be an anarchist."
"Mr. Syme is right enough there," answered Colonel Ducroix, laughing, "if only for the reason that he has plenty of property to defend. But I forgot that in your country you are not used to peasants being wealthy."
"He looks poor," said Dr. Bull doubtfully.
"Quite so," said the Colonel; "that is why he is rich."

and
"that's discipline. That's Sunday. He is perhaps five hundred miles off, but the fear of him is on all of them, like the finger of God." (This reminds me of the book Holes, where they are saved by God's thumb.)

I thought it was interesting that the criminals were all wearing black masks.

Dictionary needed: chiaroscuro a word an artist would use, right?

Reminder: the Marquis is now Ratcliffe (that's Inspector Ratcliffe to you)

Dream evidence: ...as a man in an evil dream strains himself to scream and wake...there is an awful lot of dream/nightmare talk in this book