Saturday, April 27, 2013

In "By the Waters of Babylon,'' what does John describe in the apartment? What are the objects?

In “By the Waters of Babylon,” John describes many things that he sees in the apartment of the “dead god.”  Almost all of these things are easily identifiable from what John says.


John starts by mentioning “coverings on the floor.”  These are clearly carpets or rugs.  He then says that there were chairs that were “soft and deep,” which is self-explanatory.  He mentions pictures on the walls, one of which is a pointillist painting of...

In “By the Waters of Babylon,” John describes many things that he sees in the apartment of the “dead god.”  Almost all of these things are easily identifiable from what John says.


John starts by mentioning “coverings on the floor.”  These are clearly carpets or rugs.  He then says that there were chairs that were “soft and deep,” which is self-explanatory.  He mentions pictures on the walls, one of which is a pointillist painting of flowers.  There was a “figure of a bird, in some hard clay.”  This could be ceramic or it could be plastic.  John then talks about the fact that there was a “washing-place but no water.”  This is presumably a sink or a bathtub/shower.  We cannot know which as we are not told how big it was.  In the kitchen was “a machine to cook food, (but) there was no place to put fire in it.”  This must be a stove/oven.  The “things that looked like lamps but they had neither oil nor wick” must have been electric lights.  There are faucets, which John describes as saying “hot” and “cold” but not being hot or cold.  Finally, John says that he saw “a place to make fire and a box with wood in it.”  This must have been a fireplace with wood to go in it.


These are all of the things that John describes seeing in the apartment where he spent the night and where he saw the body of the “dead god.”


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