Trinity and Other Stories (Jerry eBooks) by Nancy Kress

Author:Nancy Kress [Kress, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jerry eBooks
Published: 2014-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

But all these esoteric theories, fascinating sport though their intellectual gymnastics may provide, reduce in the end to a theory so old that it is embarrassing to realize by how many centuries we may have been anticipated. Two books, independently written, yet identical in character and incident and theme and, above all, in emotional impact, in the images evoked in that older brain that lies below the one usually concerned with words. Identical, and both brilliant, with the brilliance of a perfect object illuminated in firelight. And here it all comes together.

We have always assumed human experience to be too varied for meaningful, exact duplication. We have always supposed that how an artist “handled” a theme—as though love, death, and whatever were so many unbroken colts—was more important than the theme itself. We have always supposed that a talented writer need give only a “fresh reworking” to an archetypal experience, and the result was a new and separate work of art.

But what if we were wrong? What if the number of real, deep experiences open to man is actually small? Or, more accurately put, what if the number of resonances, of ways that seemingly varied experiences strike the human subconscious and set up answering echoes so that experience becomes meaningful, is small? And, furthermore, what if the multiplicity of presentations of these experiences, the endless boy-meets-then-loses-girl books and plays and poems from Romeo and Juliet to True Romances, were valued only because the isolated individual writer had no way to come closer to a complete rendering of what that complete archetypal ideal would feel like within the human brain?

It was Plato who wrote that man stares eternally at a cave wall, with his back to reality. What we see, what we call reality, is only shadows cast on that wall, fire-lit shadows from the actual reality behind us. The shadows dance and nod and flit, some much sharper than others, as some books and plays and poems are sharper, closer to the bone. And sometimes these authors’ made-up lies about the same experience seem to cancel each other out—as shadows must if we view them from different angles.

Romanticism. Naturalism. Realism. Epic heroism. Escapism. All our literature has, until now, been cast from a flickering fire—the imperfect glow of one artist’s mind, one artist’s fragmented perceptions of those archetypal experiences that make up human reality within the brain. The results have been fitfully brilliant, fitfully dim. Even Shakespeare is conceded to have shadowy, murky patches, though the very gloom may cast the comforting shades of ambiguity around his harsher truths and thus render them the more acceptable. But if a way could be found to build that fire higher, to build it to a steady brilliant heat that casts ever more steady and brilliant shadows, eventually those shadows will merge and overlap until they stand as sharply etched as the original, a virtual copy of the reality, unmistakable and complete. What has done so, of course, is the technology of the

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