Booya! in arcadia ego
Feb. 6th, 2006 04:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonWriting talk of the day: Wow, I hit the ground running today. A 1750 word session on Night Warrior/Born to Darkness to finish off this section of the book. Which means I will probably pull Eudora's Song and post another new chapter by the end of the week.
This section was especially gnarly for me. When I started it, I realized a whole big chunk needed to go into a previous section so I had to backtrack and add another chapter in the 6th century. This made me feel like I was losing forward momentum. But I'm good now, I think. And I have part of the next section already written, so we'll see how it goes.
Quote of the day: This quote from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (my all time favorite Stoppard play) was wending its way through my mind on the drive to work this morning. Septimus Hodge, a Byronesque tutor of a brilliant young girl, is consoling her when she becomes grief stricken over the loss of knowledge when the great library of Alexandia burned down in ancient times:
"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
--Septimus Hodge, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
No, I haven't memorized the quote, though I am certainly geeky enough to make the attempt. I long ago bought a copy of the play so I could locate this quote, which for me is the heart of the play.
There was a complex chain of thought which brought this quote to mind—in itself kind of wonderful and terrifying—but of course the chain has long since dissipated in the sun of workaday. Mozart was in there somewhere and Soliere and Amadeus. Oh yeah, it started with listening to a divertemente of Mozart's on KUSC—a beautiful thing written by him when he was on a trip to London and it was raining and his father had a headache so young Wolfie couldn't go out and play. So he sat down, eight year old Mozart did, and wrote this music instead. And I was thinking how if he'd been able to play that day maybe it would never have existed.
And that led me to thinking about undiscovered genius, and what thrusts one person before the attention of history while another person dies unknown and their good work with them. And since Arcadia was much about that, as well as about how things are invented and lost and invented again, my favorite quote came to mind.
How different the world would have been, for instance, if the Antikythera Mechanism had caught on and computers had been invented by the Ancient Greeks (who were halfway to inventing steam locomotion to power them with).
How impoverished the world would have been if Mozart had never lived, how different if he'd lived to a ripe old age.
But he lived and died when he did, and computers and steam locomotion were invented when they were invented. I've always been more of a fan of history than alternate history, but the what ifs are tantalizing.
This section was especially gnarly for me. When I started it, I realized a whole big chunk needed to go into a previous section so I had to backtrack and add another chapter in the 6th century. This made me feel like I was losing forward momentum. But I'm good now, I think. And I have part of the next section already written, so we'll see how it goes.
Quote of the day: This quote from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (my all time favorite Stoppard play) was wending its way through my mind on the drive to work this morning. Septimus Hodge, a Byronesque tutor of a brilliant young girl, is consoling her when she becomes grief stricken over the loss of knowledge when the great library of Alexandia burned down in ancient times:
"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
--Septimus Hodge, Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
No, I haven't memorized the quote, though I am certainly geeky enough to make the attempt. I long ago bought a copy of the play so I could locate this quote, which for me is the heart of the play.
There was a complex chain of thought which brought this quote to mind—in itself kind of wonderful and terrifying—but of course the chain has long since dissipated in the sun of workaday. Mozart was in there somewhere and Soliere and Amadeus. Oh yeah, it started with listening to a divertemente of Mozart's on KUSC—a beautiful thing written by him when he was on a trip to London and it was raining and his father had a headache so young Wolfie couldn't go out and play. So he sat down, eight year old Mozart did, and wrote this music instead. And I was thinking how if he'd been able to play that day maybe it would never have existed.
And that led me to thinking about undiscovered genius, and what thrusts one person before the attention of history while another person dies unknown and their good work with them. And since Arcadia was much about that, as well as about how things are invented and lost and invented again, my favorite quote came to mind.
How different the world would have been, for instance, if the Antikythera Mechanism had caught on and computers had been invented by the Ancient Greeks (who were halfway to inventing steam locomotion to power them with).
How impoverished the world would have been if Mozart had never lived, how different if he'd lived to a ripe old age.
But he lived and died when he did, and computers and steam locomotion were invented when they were invented. I've always been more of a fan of history than alternate history, but the what ifs are tantalizing.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 09:20 am (UTC)Where's your dad staging it?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 11:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 09:15 pm (UTC)Good work!
no subject
Date: 2006-02-07 09:20 am (UTC)Wait!
Date: 2006-02-07 05:45 am (UTC)Julia
Re: Wait!
Date: 2006-02-07 09:21 am (UTC)