Frankenstein - Chapter 12

I’m really enjoying this!

It’s not like I wasn’t enjoying Victor’s chapters. They were fine, but in general I find the sort of melodrama to be tiresome. As if it’s serving the point that violence and character deaths seem to serve in a lot of modern media. Give me these cogitations any day over that.

Adam has taken to observing the family from the last chapter over a period of months. The family, consisting of an older blind man, and his children Felix and Agatha, are a fine sort of family. They aren’t quite the Cratchetts in terms of how doggedly good-spirited they are, but they’re fine. Adam watches them and learns about communication, mostly.

Adam’s concerns about communication remind me of one of my favorite books: Speaking into the Air by John Durham Peters. It’s an account of the history of the idea of communication, and how that idea has never been a particularly agreed-upon concept throughout history. Adam marvels at the strangeness not only of language, but of writing, which he acknowledges as far beyond his comprehension.

Also, also, Adam is just adorable with his helping around the house. He goes out at night to pick up timber and clear the snow out from around the family’s house so that Felix can do other tasks during the day. When he notes that the family is poor, he recognizes that his filching of their food is doing harm to them, and so he sticks to eating roots and berries from the forest.

Adam spends months in his shack watching the family, as I’d said. Winter passes to spring (come to think of it, while we had a sort of rough timeline from the start of the narrative to Vic’s creating Adam, we sort of stopped keeping time after that), and the village they are in begins to teem with life again. Adam, as I’ve mentioned, is wonderful. I really love his appreciation of the world around him as contrasted against Vic’s. Whereas Victor, who by all accounts seems to be a rather diminutive and sickly person, is astounded and loves the sublime parts of nature – mountains, storms, great lakes. Adam, meanwhile, seems to take so much appreciation in very subtle aspects of the world around him – birds singing, the phases of the moon, seasons changing. It’s really quite beautiful the balance that’s struck between the two of them. I’m not sure that one is necessarily better than another, but it feels like Shelley is very deliberately making a sort of commentary about the romantic movement and its sort of fascination with the sublime and wondering if perhaps it takes more subtle aspects of nature for granted.

Really enjoying this. Adam wants to talk to the family. I hope this goes okay, but I expect it won’t