Nor will it be forgotten how one of the Sultans one day expressing doubts on the possibility of so much having happened to the Apostle in so short a time, a learned doctor of the Mohammedan law caused a basin of water to be brought and requested him to dip his head into it. When the Sultan dipped his head he found himself in a strange country, alone and friendless, on the seashore. He made his way to a neighbouring town, obtained employment, became rich, married, lived seven years with his wife, who afterwards, to his great grief, died, and then he lost all. One day he was wandering in despondency along the seashore, where he had first found himself; and in his despair he determined to cast himself into the sea. Scarcely had he done so when he beheld his courtiers standing around his throne: he was once more Sultan, and the basin of water into which he had dipped his head was before him. He began furiously to reproach the learned doctor for banishing him from his capital and sending him into the midst of vicissitudes and adventures for so many years. Nor was it without difficulty that he was brought to believe that he had only just dipped his head into the water and lifted it out again.
— Edwin Sidney Hartland, ‘The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology’
World of Warcraft.
A Danish tradition, however, runs that a bride, during the dancing and festivities of her wedding-day, left the room and thoughtlessly walked towards a mound where the elves were also making merry. The hillock was standing, as is usual on such occasions, on red pillars; and as she drew near, one of the company offered her a cup of wine. She drank, and then suffered herself to join in a dance. When the dance was over she hastened home. But alas! house, farm, everything was changed. The noise and mirth of the wedding was stilled. No one knew her; but at length, on hearing her lamentation, an old woman exclaimed: “Was it you, then, who disappeared at my grandfather's brother's wedding, a hundred years ago?”
— Ibid.
In Rocannon's World by Ursula K. Le Guin, a woman travels by spaceship to a far-off world to retrieve a family heirloom from a museum, not realising that relativistic effects of near-light-speed travel will cause time to pass far more slowly for her than for her home planet. She returns – after what she experiences as only a matter of days – to find her daughter grown up and her husband dead.
Relativistic time-dilation is real, although we have not yet applied it at any significant scale.
We now have the power to make two particular categories of fairytale entirely real. I'm not sure what this means.
Sumire wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel—wild, cool, dissolute. She’d stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-framed Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her 20/20 vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversized herringbone coat from a second-hand shop and a pair of rough work boots. If she’d been able to grow a beard, I’m sure she would have.
I am in Scotland now, and I am spending most of my time doing physical kinds of work – gardening, repairs, DIY, that kind of thing. It's quite unusual for me to be physically engaged in things; in my usual work my body is a distraction, interrupting me at inconvenient moments with the need to eat or pee.
It's a nice change to be working with my body for once, rather than against it.
On the other side of things, a certain buzzing sensation has all but disappeared from my brain. I suspect that's largely to do with my vastly reduced Internet hours, and the fact that most of my energy is now powering underused muscles. But I suspect it's also something that the countryside does to me. (Or maybe the city does, and the countryside doesn't.)
I didn't realise the buzz was even there until it started to dissipate. My head feels a little quieter and calmer these days. I'm not sure that I'll be particularly willing to go back to the way things were, but I may not have much choice. Needs must.
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. 'What a day it is!'
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We'll pay for it, we'll pay for it, we'll pay for it!’
…in studying economic history, we tend to systematically ignore the role of violence, the absolutely central role of war and slavery in creating and shaping the basic institutions of what we now call “the economy”. What’s more, origins matter. The violence may be invisible, but it remains inscribed in the very logic of our economic common sense, in the apparently self-evident nature of institutions that simply would never and could never exist outside of the monopoly of violence – but also, the systematic threat of violence – maintained by the contemporary state.
It took me a little over twenty-four hours to get from one side of the planet Earth to its furthest point on the opposite side. Twenty-four hours to cross – forty-eight to circle entirely – the setting for everything humanity has ever been and done.
This makes me feel a little sad, like I've grown too large for the planet.
I read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness on the plane, somewhere over the Pacific. That world still had blank patches on the map, although even there – it's set in the colonial era – those patches were rapidly being filled in.
Of course, there were always people all over the place, but we weren't always so connected to those people. It wasn't always so damn universal. Everyone had different gaps on their maps, but gaps they were.
Call of the Wild, Heart of Darkness, Ballard's The Drowned World – they're all about places… not hard to find, maybe, but hard to reach. Now, everywhere is just too connected to everywhere else. Our wildernesses have become parks.
A day on a plane from Auckland, New Zealand, then five hours more on a bus, and I'm in the forest wilds of Finland. Doesn't seem so wild anymore.
Hence our hankering for other worlds, I guess. Not even for the novelty of alien worlds. Simply for the void, the emptiness. The blank spots on the map.
A small selection of racial stereotypes as related to us by some of our (usually Swedish) hosts.
A Finn and a Swede are drinking together. They pour fresh drinks. The Swede raises his glass and says “skål” (“cheers”). The Finn says: “Are we going to talk rubbish, or are we going to drink?”
The Swedes (we are told) are the Germans of Scandinavia, the Danes are the French of Scandinavia, and the Norwegians are the Norwegians of Scandinavia.
“The Finns are exactly the grim, knife-toting drunkards everyone imagines them to be.”
Now ponder something that comes through even the party-line demonization of a crushed enemy -- this clear-cut and undeniable fact: Sauron's army was the one that included every species and race on Middle Earth, including all the despised colors of humanity, and all the lower classes.
Hmm. Did they all leave their homes and march to war thinking, “Oh, goody, let's go serve an evil Dark Lord”?
Or might they instead have thought they were the “good guys,” with a justifiable grievance worth fighting for, rebelling against an ancient, rigid, pyramid-shaped, feudal hierarchy topped by invader-alien elfs and their Numenorean-colonialist human lackeys?
