Magical Convergences
Is there a reading version of a double take? I suppose instead of a turn of the head, it’s a flick of one’s eyes back over what they just read. It’s a jolt of familiarity, a sense of déjà vu. In that moment, you feel all your synapses light up, forming new connections of understanding.
I’m referring to those magical moments when you read something that harkens back to a different book, and it enhances both experiences. I think some of the best of these convergences involve intersections of nonfiction and fiction.
Allow me to provide some personal examples. Around the beginning of 2022, I was finishing Cosmos, by the incomparable Carl Sagan. It was a weighty endeavor which took me over a month to finish. But Sagan made the topic of astrophysics digestible, and he served it with a side of wonder.
Around that same time, I also picked up “Time Thief” by Sir Terry Pratchett. Having read other works in his Discworld universe, I was familiar with Pratchett’s style of zany humor, satirical world-building, and moments of unexpected wisdom. I felt the title of this installment made it a fitting choice for the turn of the new year.
I enjoyed reading about how the Monks of History keep order in the world of “Time Thief”. An old master and his precocious novice are on a quest. They need to prevent an all-to-gifted clockmaker from making a clock that could trap, and stop, Time. Then, out of the blue, PHYSICS! As the monks run faster and faster, they see their surroundings bathed in crimson. This is an accurate portrayal of an actual scientific phenomenon known as red shift, which I had just learned about in Cosmos. As two astral bodies move apart from one another, the light wavelengths are stretched longer. Our human eyes perceive them as red.
This particular bit of imagery stuck with me, so I added another facet to this particular convergence by including a reference to red shift in a piece of my own writing. “Self Care”, a surreal parody of a health magazine article about treating yourself to some wellness and pampering, went on to be featured in the anthology Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away from Alan Squire Publishing, edited by the wonderful Hannah Grieco.
Need another example? Next up: neuroscience! In Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, the authors show how creativity can be influenced by play, new experiences, and adversity. Then, in the sci-fi classic Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card*, I noticed how the military used games to train and evaluate their child recruits’ tactical skills. Ender’s advanced empathy skills, something that Kaufman and Gregoire also discuss the benefits of, play significantly into his advanced aptitude.
But wait, there’s more! I also like to nerd out about the topic of linguistics. The language that we think in and communicate in can shape our reality, perspective, and perceived possibilities.
Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses the differences between English and the Indigenous Potawatomi language in her acclaimed bestseller, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants:
“English is a noun-based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things. Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi, that proportion is 70 percent.”
She goes on to explain that many words we English-speakers take for granted as being nouns, are instead expressed in an animate verb form in Potawatomi. For example, instead of calling a moving body of water a “river”, their language translates to “being a river”.
“To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy?” Kimmerer asks.
The Potawatomi extend this honor to plants and animals, but also the elements, the land itself, and places. This consideration then plays into the belief system of respectful reciprocity with the natural world that the Potawatomi hold dear.
Now let’s turn to some examples in fiction. Two stories in Ted Chiang’s award-winning collection, The Story of Us and Others, display how particular speech can limit or expand one’s ability to process and interact with the world.
In “Understand”, Chiang depicts a medically enhanced genius who has to write his own new internal language in order to fully think as expansively as he has the capacity to. The character’s creation is a hybrid of traditional vocabulary, math, and 3D geometric rendering. In “The Story of Us”, which inspired the movie Arrival, Chiang has an alien species teach a human linguist their form of communication, in which there are no tenses. Everything happens simultaneously. Subsequently, this allows her to view her own life’s events in a nonlinear way.
Charlie Jane Anders’ “Promises Greater than Darkness”, the last installment of her Unstoppable trilogy, provides an additional example. The alien species, the Grattna, have three eyes, three limbs, and three wings. They see all decisions as having three possible outcomes, and their grammatical structure weaves together three comparisons or relationships throughout. As the human characters learn the Grattna language, and to respect their civilization, they find new ways to open up their black-and-white thinking.
The thing is, once you are in tune with the possibility of these beautiful convergences happening, you see them more and more often. It starts as a little tingle, dancing there at the edge of your awareness. Before you know it, it’s jumping off the page at you as if it is written in neon lettering. So keep your eyes peeled and your mind open. You’re in for a treat.
Thanks for reading!
Sarah
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*Disclaimer about Orson Scott Card: His fiction is brilliant, but he’s a homophobic twit. It blows my mind that someone that wrote the Ender’s Game series, with its themes of interplanetary species diversity and understanding, could be so closed minded and hateful when it comes to the diversity of human love.