The life of books

[quetzalphoenix]

Maybe it's just that I have an overstimulated response to reading, or that I just pick books that always relate somehow, or that I read too much Jorge Luis Borges, but... I'm always amazed at how much books connect thematically with each other and with life (I'll explain the first briefly)...

Anyone else have this experience? For example...

This summer, I decided to read Walker Percy's "Lost in the Cosmos" because a professor of mine recommended it. At the same time I read Kevin Vanhoozer's "Is There a Meaning in this Text?" for an upcoming class. Then, for fun, I thought I'd reread Umberto Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum" (which may be the source of this whole over-connectedness deal!) ...

Each of these books deals with humans as sign-making, symbol-using beings, with the possibility/impossibility of transcending our context to actually understand reality.

It would take too much time to explain the connections I've been finding in these and other books, but it does remind me of one of Borges' short stories about the Library. And of course, finding these connections while reading Eco's book--which itself questions the making of these connections...

Just some thoughts, I guess about what the Indeterminate Future Manifestations of the richness of reality (or the infinite fusions of textual horizons?) God has made a complex creation--and we have much power and responsibility in responding to it!

[kiwimac]

Terry Pratchett's theory of "l-Space" applies

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter.

The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Terry Pratchett. Guards, Guards.

Kiwimac

[Patroclus]

I think that a lot of it has to do with the way that people with similar lifestyles (specifically that of writers) share similar concerns. Take a look at time periods. It is across time periods in literature that the subjects change the most drastically.

[quetzalphoenix]

Today @ 12:24 AM post located here (http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=120652#post120652)
Patroclus:

I think that a lot of it has to do with the way that people with similar lifestyles (specifically that of writers) share similar concerns. Take a look at time periods. It is across time periods in literature that the subjects change the most drastically.

Very true--although I wonder as well if it has to do with my own mental grid. I've had the same experience reading works from far-ranging time periods. I think sometimes it's discovering a concept or a pattern and then "finding" it in other places. Sometimes rightfully, sometimes not.

It's a simultaneously exciting thing (wow--life has coherance) and an unsettling one (is the coherance in my head/these texts only?).