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Sunday, May 16, 2010

Gulliver's Travels

I've started on the final text of the university course entitled Narratives of Romance and Adventure.  I read an abridged version, many years ago, as a child.  As I recall, very vaguely, there were no references to defecation, concupiscence (a word I had to turn to a dictionary to confirm my guess at its meaning) or the enormous breast of the Brobdingnag nurse:

I must confess no object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colour.  It stood prominent six feet, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference.  The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug, so varied with spots, pimples, and freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous: for I had a near sight of her, she sitting down, the more conveniently to give suck, and I standing on the table.

Three hundred years after it was written, the ridiculousness of persecuting big-enders seems
like a contemporary comment on the absurdities of today's religious enmities.
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