Readings: Victor Hugo, "Les Miserables"

Alongside Babbage, I am reading Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables".

an aside:

I spent my youth in a strict French School where our professors revealed to me and my classmates (several times over, year after year) everything great in this world has been endowed to humanity thanks to the French. And I believed them! So enamoured was I by the rule of the French that I insisted on adding the letter 'E' to the end of every word I spelled...

Now back to the reading. I picked up the text because it is a long time coming that a student of architecture such as myself should get to know the work and its awesome architectural dimensions. And while I would like to talk about sewers and guts of another dimension figuring prominently in the novel, I mention Hugo at this point in the blog for another reason. There is a wonderfully petit chapter about water and sky that caught my attention as I began to wonder about my beast machine. I have dutifullied copied it below (and broken some copyright rules along with it, pardonez-moi SVP), it is lovely and terrifying.

Book Two: The Outcast, Chapter Eight: Sea and Shadow

"Man Overboard!
But the ship does not stop. The wind is blowing and the doomladen vessel is set on a course from which it cannot depart. It sails on.
The man sinks and reappears, flings up his arms and shouts, but no one hears. The ship, heeling in the wind, is intent upon its business, and passengers and crew have lost sight of him, a pinpoint in the immensity of the sea.
He calls despairingly, gazing in anguish after the receding sail as, ghostlike, if fades from view. A short time ago he was on board, a member of the crew buy on deck with the rest, a living being with his share of air and sunlight. What has become of him now? He slipped and fell, and this is the end.
He is adrift in the monstrous waters with only their turbulence beneath him, hideously enclosed by wave-crests shredded by the wind, smothered as they break over his head, tumbled from one to another, rising and sinking into unfathomable darkness where he seems to become a part of the abyss, his mouth filled with bitter resentment at this treacherous ocean that is so resolved to destroy him, this monster toying with his death. To him, the sea has become the embodiment of hatred.
But he goes on swimming, still struggles despairingly for life, his strength dwindling as he battles against the inexhaustible. Above him he can see only the black pallor of the clouds. He is the witness in his death-throes of the immeasurable dementia of the sea, and, tormented by this madness, he hears the sounds unknown to man that seem to come from some dreadful place beyond the bounds of earth. There are birds flying amid the clouds as angels soar over the distresses of mankind, but what can they do for him? They sing as they glide and hover, and he grasps for life.
He is lost between the infinite of the sea and sky, the one a tome, the other a shroud. Darkness is falling. He has swum for hours until his strength is at an end and the ship with its company of men has long since passed from sight. Solitary in the huge gulf of twilight he twists and turn, feeling the waves of the unknowable close in upon him. And for the last time he calls, but not to man. Where is God?
He calls to anyone or anything - he calls and he calls but there is no reply, nothing on the face of the waters, nothing in the heaves. He calls to the sea and the spray, but they are deaf; he calls to the winds, but they are answerable only to infinity. Around him dusk and solitude, the heedless tumult of wild waters; within him, terror and exhaustion; below him the descent into nothingness. No foothold. He pictures his body adrift in that limitless dark. The chill numbs him. He hands open and close, clutching at nothing. Wind and tumult and useless stars. What can he do? Despair ends in resignation, exhaustion chooses death, and so at length he gives up the struggle and his body sinks for ever.
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?"

Right, so that last paragraph is a bit too moralizing for me, but it does not take away from the overall startling and fearful impression Hugo creates in the characters of Wind and Water. I recently made a little sketch of how I want to set up my beast, and I noted that alongside the amplification of the noises and vapour effects of the MachinaKafe, I also need to retrace the inherent hierarchy of water and steam elements as devised by the form and section of apparatus. I am looking for datums; steam and hot water stem from the same source, but when heated and carried off by the laws of gravity and the aid of some tubes become two very different element whose physical transformations have the potential to illuminate very different and contrasting effects on space and our reading of space.

bonne nuit!