Author Archives: cloudvilian

Day 197…

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Reality bites. Truth hurts. Times flies. Life kills.

In the midst of it all, I’m juggling. Starting. Stopping. Rising. Praying. Falling. Growing. Saying. Hoping. Changing.

I had a plan for 2012. Now, with less than four months to go, this is finally where the rubber meets the road.

See you in November.

 

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The VWS Experience

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Recently, I came across this frightfully apt description of courts penned in England around 1851 by Charles Dickens in his book, “Bleak House”:

“…Some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar are mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might

(…)

The various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be — as are they not? — ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.

(…)

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give — who does not often give — the warning, ‘Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!'”

How relevant so many centuries later!