i put a spell on you

Meanwhile...

So I work at a library and about a month ago I helped a little old woman who is legally blind figure out how to listen to our audiobooks on her tablet. We got to chatting and I mentioned that I always listen to audiobooks while I knit, which made her very excited and she told me all about the afghans she used to make when she could still see. She was so sweet and I was so glad to be able to help her figure out a way to still enjoy books without being able to read.

“You are making breakfast in every dream that I have of you. You are in the kitchen, your soft middle pressed up against the cold marble countertops like a vision too beautiful for the magazines, sprinkling dark chocolate chips over pancakes. I think for a brief second that I am dreaming inside of my dream, that I had to make you up twice, just to get it right. You, brushing your dark hair out of your face, smearing batter across your cheeks. You have come and made my dreams smaller, narrower. Filled them with sugar and your body humming in the same room as mine. I dream, now, of a normal life with you. A life where breakfast lasts until the sun goes down, until I have finished gazing at you from across the table, flour dried to your forehead like a kiss.”

The popular idea of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is just ever so slightly incorrect, but the distinction makes a difference in my opinion.

And this summary also misses part of the main point: which was that the poor IRISH should sell their children to the rich ENGLISH to be eaten. This essay wasn’t just about the poor and the rich; it was about the attitudes of the English to the Irish, attitudes which later led to the Irish genocide of the Great Famine. Swift was sick of the way the English were constantly coming up with stupid “proposals” of how to deal with the “Irish problem”, proposals that were ultimately both useless and inhumane to the Irish, and completely ignored the fact that the problem was the English upper-class themselves who, among other things, were landlords to the Irish, squeezing the rents out of them while putting absolutely nothing back into the land or making sure that their tenants had the basic necessities of life. Swift says,