IDA: A Study in Gold 3-36
It’s been 6 days since my last analysis post due to a couple of my usual complications: wrist pain and issues with my sleeping schedule. The latter is something I’m steadily addressing, but the former is something that I’m starting to accept will be a chronic problem. There are going to be days when my wrists are feeling stressed and I’ll have to refrain from writing anything more than a short journal entry.
I’ll be trying to change things up again today though. Allotting only one hour to write in, with breaks, has only left me feeling dissatisfied with the amount I was getting done in a day. This time I’ve scheduled four hours as a writing period which is even longer than before I had wrist problems, but I’m lifting all restrictions on tabbing out to watch YouTube videos. The idea is that even if I spent 75% of this time resting, it’ll still be more time spent writing than before.
Admittedly, I could have just written past one hour before, but it was hard to muster the motivation to work what felt like “overtime” according to my own schedule. Instead of trying to convince myself to work overtime, I’m just changing the schedule itself so that extra time is no longer overtime: it’s just the regular writing time.
Anyway, I’ve been chipping along at a paragraph a sentence at a time. Based on the past couple of sentences, it’ll likely continue to list out the different types of callers that Nicholas has had.
The same afternoon brought a rather disreputable-looking weasel, who appeared to me to be much excited, and who was closely followed by a slip-shod elderly horse mare.
I’m not actually sure what exactly “the same afternoon” is referring to here. Looking at the sentence in isolation, one would think it describes how both this weasel and mare came by in the “same afternoon,” but that’s sort of redundant when the mare is described as having “closely followed” the weasel. The alternative is that this is the afternoon of the same day as the porcupine that came by “one morning,” though I suppose the wording would have explicitly said “the same day, that afternoon.”
Taking a second look, it’s really the redundancy that made me second guess things here. This sort of redundancy would normally imply some level of importance, yet it’s pretty clear that the individual details here aren’t too important because it’s all coming in as items in a list. Still, even if it’s important for the reader to know that this pair of mammals sequentially met with Nicholas in the same afternoon, I feel like just one of these descriptions would be enough: having both doesn’t add anything other than the redundancy itself.
Though I say the nature of these details being part of a list makes them appear less significant, the weasel here is likely to be an analogue of Duke Weaselton from the movie. He’s even specifically described as being “much excited,” which can leave the reader curious. If he actually shows up again later in the story, it’s likely a small part since I don’t recall it, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised about it.
As for the old mare, she doesn’t seem remarkably important given the details here. She largely seems to be here to contrast with the disreputable and excited weasel, as well as all of the other callers of course.
On another occasion an old white-furred squirrel had an interview with my companion; and on another a platypus in the velveteen uniform of a railway porter.
The list of callers continues. With the “rule of three,” I wouldn’t have been too surprised for the prior sentence to have been the last one. Though, if we’re looking at the number of callers on this list, the prior sentence skipped straight over three by adding two more. At this point, Judith is really hammering home the idea that all sorts of mammals come to see Nicholas, regardless of species, age, gender, or social status. As far as Judith can tell, they all have a variety of business with the fox as well.
My first impression when seeing the interview was actually that Nicholas was the one being interviewed, perhaps as a follow-up after a successful case or something. After thinking about it, it’s probably more likely that the squirrel may have been a witness and Nicholas was the one conducting the interview. The way it is phrased though, I think it could still work either way and it would be more clear if interview were used as a verb rather than a noun here.
Interestingly, “on another” is used twice here for both halves of this sentence. One may think I’d have a problem with this given the issue I had with redundancy earlier, but this repetition helps to get across the idea that Judith could just keep going on with this list. Nicholas has had many callers and each example she gives will be significantly unique from the others. At this point, I’d expect her to move on from listing these callers though, because anything more would feel like overdoing it after this repetition.
