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more musings on the two foregoing
Aug. 3rd, 2006 08:53 am"Patterns are baleful things," Charles Williams once wrote, "and the irony of the universe ensures that it will accept any pattern we choose to impose upon it."
Williams, of course, believed that there was a pattern, a pretty amazing one. He simply didn't presume to know exactly what it was, beyond our imaginings of what it might be.
Even so with the law of large numbers. The sheer number of happenstance occurrences guarantees that uncanny coincidences will happen with dismaying frequency. Some of them seem to imply a pattern unknown to our ordinary existence.
But this is why I like Mircea Eliade's The Forbidden Forest; Eliade, who once wrote about the importance of finding myth-like patterns in our lives "even if they aren't there," didn't let his Romanian characters escape definitively into any of the alternate universes they always seem to be sliding towards. Yet the whole novel is as uncanny as any I've read, in spite of long stretches that are, as Eliade admitted, wearisomely plodding.
We are hard-wired to overstretch pattern recognition. The old friend from college days who introduced me to the work of the novelist mentioned in the previous post was struck by his own extraordinary resemblance to the protagonist of the two volumes he lent me: Like the protagonist, my friend had been raised as an exile in coal-country Kentucky (by a physician father), had gone to great lengths to get volumes of lore from great distances, remembered Little Nemo in Slumberland, was greatly inclined to spiritual and sexual misadventures simultaneously, was an unstably situated professor and writer, and otherwise felt that said novelist had been eavesdropping on him. He insisted that as I read, I would think I was the protagonist's old friend who ends up in the same town after a period of separation (as the two of us had). I pointed out that though I was born and raised in smalltown Florida, I too felt exiled, and had placed tremendous emphasis on finding books and information by mail over great distances. Furthermore, my thoughts echoed those of the protagonist's more than those of the protagonist's friend (I had, I reminded Edward, introduced my own friend to the work of Frances Yates, and Ioan Couliano for that matter), and that if anything, I resembled a composite of three of the main characters. And this is usually the case with novels we come to love, which he, as a writer of fiction, should remember.
But I agreed it was a weirdly long string of coincidences.
The never before completely translated Hypnerotomachia Polyphili was published in an elegant 500th anniversary volume at that very moment, and I presented him with a copy for Christmas.
Williams, of course, believed that there was a pattern, a pretty amazing one. He simply didn't presume to know exactly what it was, beyond our imaginings of what it might be.
Even so with the law of large numbers. The sheer number of happenstance occurrences guarantees that uncanny coincidences will happen with dismaying frequency. Some of them seem to imply a pattern unknown to our ordinary existence.
But this is why I like Mircea Eliade's The Forbidden Forest; Eliade, who once wrote about the importance of finding myth-like patterns in our lives "even if they aren't there," didn't let his Romanian characters escape definitively into any of the alternate universes they always seem to be sliding towards. Yet the whole novel is as uncanny as any I've read, in spite of long stretches that are, as Eliade admitted, wearisomely plodding.
We are hard-wired to overstretch pattern recognition. The old friend from college days who introduced me to the work of the novelist mentioned in the previous post was struck by his own extraordinary resemblance to the protagonist of the two volumes he lent me: Like the protagonist, my friend had been raised as an exile in coal-country Kentucky (by a physician father), had gone to great lengths to get volumes of lore from great distances, remembered Little Nemo in Slumberland, was greatly inclined to spiritual and sexual misadventures simultaneously, was an unstably situated professor and writer, and otherwise felt that said novelist had been eavesdropping on him. He insisted that as I read, I would think I was the protagonist's old friend who ends up in the same town after a period of separation (as the two of us had). I pointed out that though I was born and raised in smalltown Florida, I too felt exiled, and had placed tremendous emphasis on finding books and information by mail over great distances. Furthermore, my thoughts echoed those of the protagonist's more than those of the protagonist's friend (I had, I reminded Edward, introduced my own friend to the work of Frances Yates, and Ioan Couliano for that matter), and that if anything, I resembled a composite of three of the main characters. And this is usually the case with novels we come to love, which he, as a writer of fiction, should remember.
But I agreed it was a weirdly long string of coincidences.
The never before completely translated Hypnerotomachia Polyphili was published in an elegant 500th anniversary volume at that very moment, and I presented him with a copy for Christmas.
