Actually it was Werribee Open Range Zoo, we went on Sunday to an engagement party. It was a great place for a party, we got to go on the safari tour and then had a barbeque and partied to the Rhythm of Africa until the zoo closed. Which is about 9pm so it wasn’t a late night.
I was using Dreamweaver (software by Macromedia to help build websites) today to do some search and replace on strings of code and other random things, and it occurred to me that it would take all afternoon by hand, but Dreamweaver lets me do it in about 2 minutes. So I thanked God for Dreamweaver.
Then I thought, that’s a bit weird, thanking God for a piece of software.
Then I thought, no it’s not, we should be thankful in all circumstances.
But it still seems a bit weird. 9-5 job, computers, internet, websites, international software corporations – none of those would have been in the mind of those that wrote the parts of the Bible where it says “in all things give thanks”. None. I’m just assuming that it covers my situation. I’m interpreting the Bible, translating its message into a modern context. I’m performing exegesis on the fly.
Don’t you think that’s interesting? Even such a simple verse as this requires interpretation to make it useful – and where there’s interpretation there’s the possibility (perhaps inevitability) that people will interpret it differently. So anyone that thinks the Bible can be read “without interpretation” – like people who say “our church preaches the Bible and nothing else” – they are fooling themselves. There is always exegesis. There is always interpretation. Otherwise it’s meaningless.
It’s dark by the time I take the train back. The wind carries a light snow with it, pirhuk. My mind registers it as if through an anaesthetic.
In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world. A focused, sporadically selective view. When you scan a desert or an ice floe, you see with different eyes. You let the details slip out of focus in favour of the whole. This way of seeing reveals a different reality. If you look at someone’s face in this manner, it starts to dissolve into a shifting series of masks.
With this way of seeing, a person’s breath in the cold – that veil of cooled drops that forms in the air in temperatures under -8`C – is not merely a phenomenon fifty centimetres from his mouth. It’s something all-encompassing, a structural transformation of the space surrounding a warm-blooded creature, an aura of minimal but definite thermal replacement. I’ve seen hunters shoot snow hares in a starless winter night at a distance of two hundred and fifty metres by aiming at the fog around them.
I am not a hunter. And I’m asleep inside. Maybe I’m close to giving up. But I sense him when I’m fifty metres away, before he hears me. He’s standing between the two marble pillars which flank the gate leading from Strandvejen to the stairs.
In the city, in the Nørrebro district, people stand on streetcorners and in doorways; it doesn’t mean anything. But on Strandvejen it is significant. And besides, I’ve grown hypersensitive. So I shrug off the resignation, take several steps backwards, and slip into next door’s garden.
I really enjoyed this book. The main character Smilla is skilfully developed and is beautifully intriguing, a woman born in Greenland who now lives in Denmark and is an expert on ice. The setting is the cold depths of winter, and her knowledge of all things snow and ice leads her on a compelling quest when she becomes suspicious after examining the snow around the dead body of a boy from her apartment block.
One thing I love is the way Høeg develops the plot. It starts out with a small suspicion on the part of Smilla and grows slowly throughout the book. Revelation is drawn out, and this kept me totally enthralled. Even small events within the book will not be explained until half a chapter later, and the reader is often kept one step behind Smilla as she makes connections between people and events to reveal a plot that involves scientists, Greenland, ice and the death of a little boy.
Highly recommended.