GETTING STUCK

It is probably a natural symptom of intellectual decay but I have recently got stuck. I had to abandon reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch after about 150 pages. I enjoy reading but in time I shied away from even looking at my copy of the novel. I shuddered, allowed myself to be distracted into completing crosswords or scanning magazines instead of doing my duty and reading George Eliot. For weeks I was wracked with guilt at my dereliction and feebly self-justified my actions by saying I disliked the heroine Dorothea Brooke and her involvement with the dashing doctor Tertius Lydgate and enigmatic Will Ladislaw. But the blame lies entirely with me, not with George Eliot. In the dim and distant I recall struggling a little with The Mill on the Floss but I had loved Silas Marner. Maybe if I had seen the admired 1994 BBC TV adaptation of Middlemarch, I would have been better prepared, but more likely I am just a disengaged lost cause.

Will and Dorothea in BBC's Middlemarch

I only recall getting stuck in this way once before. About four years ago I had to abandon The Problem of Pain by C.S.Lewis. I had expected some sparkling theology on the lines of The Screwtape Letters but this was heavier fare and I found it indigestible. Speaking to my splendid son, Eddy, he confessed to getting stuck on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which I had recommended, and on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which I like him had found too declamatory but I persevered to the bitter end. Talking to Eddy reassured me that the agile-minded also sometimes got stuck and I was perhaps not yet going totally gaga.

I suppose we all get stuck in some way or another – there were after all the three, some say seven, old ladies who got famously stuck in the lavatory! The stick-in-the-mud is a familiar figure, he who has little capacity for fun and who is immobile and unenterprising. Avoid him, he is an enemy of that conviviality which warms our hearts and enlivens our existence.

My butterfly mind flits on to the stuck pig. Pig-sticking (or boar hunting if you prefer) was an enthusiasm of the Ancients as many an old carved relief will testify. Popular throughout medieval Europe until wild boar became rare, pig-sticking was a cherished equestrian sport of Asians and of the British Army in India. Wild boar are a fierce and dangerous quarry and pig-sticking was a particular passion of Robert Baden-Powell, famed founder of the Scouts. He wrote a book in 1924 about this sport and to those who denounced it as cruel he explained:


 "Try it before you judge. See how the horse enjoys it, see how the boar himself, mad with rage, rushes wholeheartedly into the scrap, see how you, with your temper thoroughly roused, enjoy the opportunity of wreaking it to the full. Yes, hog-hunting is a brutal sport—and yet I loved it, as I loved also the fine old fellow I fought against." 


Willie Rushton suggested that Baden-Powell's love of pig-sticking is a good reason for any self-respecting Boy Scout to "hand in his woggle and garters” and for sure it is not nowadays a politically correct activity!


Returning to “getting stuck” it will be evident to my long-suffering readers that I do not suffer much from writers' block. Whatever may obstruct my reading, my writing tumbles on and on like an unrelenting torrent. Conjuring up a suitable subject, I summon up some gumption and promptly “get stuck in!”



SMD
31.03.15
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015.