Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

the law plays fast and loose with reality — and no one really believes it.

A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, must, in the nature of things, be different from that same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.

That's a lot of commas!

Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country. And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less about the common people for whom they legislated.

How very like our times.

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground.

“Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”

a pretty girl of about seventeen whom she introduced as her granddaughter Hazel.

Just the right age for Luke, eh?

And she’s a stuck-up young miss, very high and keeping herself to herself.

Ah, well that seals it — they're foredoomed to be thrown together.

preparing them, in fact, to be one day useful and accomplished wives.

Ah! So *that's* what makes a wife useful. I've always wondered.

‘There’s no clock like the sun and no calendar like the stars.’ And why? Because it gets one used to the look of Time. There’s no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time. But when one’s been used all one’s life to seeing him naked, as it were, instead of shut up in a clock, like he is in Lud, one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as an old ox dragging the plough. And to watch Time teaches one to sing.

Endymion

I wonder if there are any humans with that name?