I’ll be showing my new book, A Strange New World, so come and stop by my booth and say hi!

Extinction

I’ve been slowly reading my way through Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is a book of short sketches of fantastical cities told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. At one point, Kublai Kahn accuses Marco Polo of making the cities up and concentrating on insignificant and disappointing places, and he replies:

“While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered. “

One of the cities: “But in vain I set out to  visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her”

How many memories can our brains realistically store? We keep building and buiding on top of old thoughts, pulling the most signicant memories to the surface so they dont disappear in the confusion. I like to think about dinosaurs, who have long been extinct– well before recorded history, and yet we have created stories and memorials to them. Their bodies have been reassembled– and they’ve been recreated into something that everyone believes existed- even though we’ve never had any personal interaction with them- no people have. It makes me think about how changable and subjective the past is– we don’t have a lot of say in how we’re percieved and what stories will be created to explain our existence.

I’m new at this whole sharing thoughts with the entire internet thing, so bear with me.

“These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.”

-Gilbert Highet

I learned about Gilbert Highet today– he said all sorts of amazing things, such as

“The mind never need stop growing. Indeed, one of the few experiences which never pall is the experience of watching one’s own mind and how it produces new interests, responds to new stimuli, and develops new thoughts, apparently without effort and almost independently of one’s own conscious control.”

and

“By taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.”

*Edit***

Pat rightly pointed out that I need to say a little bit more when I’m going about this sort of thing.

Gilbert Highet was a Humanities teacher at Columbia, from roughly 1937- 1970ish. You can read about him here: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2001/Highet.html

One of the more exciting things that I thought about when reading about him was how he tried to apply classic stories, characters, and morals to real life.

The above quotes really speak to me in particular because of my difficult of separating reality from the inner brain thoughts of dreams/fiction/fantasy. That’s a theme that crops up often in my work– trying to balance the need to deal with everyday things ( job, food, etc.) and getting caught up in thoughts about existence, the nature of reality, and other impractical things. Hence the drawing of a chicken-creature standing on top of someone’s head.