It was by this time about nine in the
morning, and the first fog of the season. A great chocolate-coloured pall
lowered over heaven, but the wind was continually charging and routing these
embattled vapours; so that as the cab crawled from street to street, Mr.
Utterson beheld a marvellous number of degrees and hues of twilight; for here
it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a
rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for
a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight
would glance in between the swirling wreaths.
NOTE: I've been growing (as I
expect you may have also) angry lately hearing the expression "the fog of
war" used over and over in the news (by journalists, diplomats, even
soldiers) to describe and in a very real sense justify the "atrocity of
the day" (most recently the terrible killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers
last week in a NATO raid supposedly launched in error against
"friendly" forces). Sometimes
it seems to be spoken as an answer before a question is even asked.
I’ve always loved fog – clouds on the
ground -- rolling through them on foot.
The passage here, in case you don’t recognize it, is from Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which contains many fog
references. In a fit of pique, I decided
to Google “the fog of peace,” not realizing that it too has become a cliché – a
tiresome “irony cliché” that has been adopted by political journalists,
historians, etc. Too bad, it’s an
evocative phrase without the politics and attitude. I’ll stick with “peaceful fog,” although that’s
not very Dr Jekyll, a long short story where peace is in very small supply.
