an elk-hound and a rosebush:

the only two things which matter to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, at least by the end of the sixteenth century (things do get better for Orlando by the twentieth, by which time he's had the great fortune to be transformed into a woman). I'm in the midst of writing a paper on the novel, to be delivered at a conference in the UK this June, and so I thought it would be appropriate at this juncture, having recently been subjected to some of the very worst most mean-spirited condescention that human nature can spew, to turn to Woolf's hero/ine herself, after her own similarly fatiguing run-in with "society" (in the eighteenth century):

"'Is this,' she asked--but there was none to answer, 'is this what people call life?' The spaniel raised her forepaw in token of sympathy. The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand. Orlando kissed the spaniel with her lips. In short, there was the truest sympathy between them that can be between a dog and its mistress, and yet, it cannot be denied that the dumbness of animals is a great impediment to the refinements of intercourse. They wag their tails, they bow the front part of the body and elevant the hind; they roll, they jump, they paw, they whine, they bark, they slobber; they have all sorts of ceremonies and artifices of their own, but the whole thing is of no avail, since speak they cannot. Such was her quarrel, she thought, setting the dog gently on to the floor, with the great people at Arlingon House. They, too, wag their tails, roll, jump, paw, and slobber, but talk they cannot. 'All these months that I've been out in the world,' said Orlando, pitching one stocking across the room, 'I've heard nothing but what Pippin might have said. I'm cold. I'm happy. I'm hungry. I've caught a mouse. I've buried a bone. Please kiss my nose.' And it was not enough" (195-6).



It's too good for me to even gloss.

By the way-- I'm back together with my own Orlando furioso. Hurrah!