Damn

[desperance]

Words, thoughts: they are as slippery as olive oil, and as fugitive.

I had this lovely literary figure last night, that I wrote into the book - and then hesitated, because it was based on a falsehood. Which the character would likely have believed, but the intelligent reader would not; and you always hesitate before putting in a line which you know a reader will trip over, however appropriate and measured and beautiful it may be in situ.

So I hesitated, and wrote it at the bottom of the page, out of place, to come back to in the morning. Which is now. And I have come back, firm of purpose, it shall go in: and now I can't quite remember how the figure would have worked, what it was meant to express. Damn.

The line?

The dead will always outnumber the living.

It's not true, we know that now - but they didn't necessarily know it in mediaeval dynastic China, and she's not the kind of girl to sit down and figure it out, if it's swelling in her mind like an eternal truth.

But. That's no bloody use, if I can't remember what I was going to do with it...

Comments

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

If you don't use it, can I have it? It fits in wonderfully with chapter two of something I'm doing right now, at the height of the Great War when even if it wasn't true, it probably felt like it.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Surely. Help yourself. (We can always share. In a hundred years, scholars will delight in these remote -archived! - coincidences...)

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

Actually, while I'm plundering you, where does "desperance" come from? That would make a goodly name for the character who says the line, making a neat symmetry.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

You're welcome to that, too. It's a cheat: I wrote a story called "The Keys to D'Esperance", with the intention of writing a whole slew of stories, a history of 20thc England through the story of a house. Only I never wrote the others. You can find "Keys" here:

Actually, by the time the keys came, he no longer believed in the house. It was like God, he thought; they oversold it. (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/keys.htm)

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

That's a great little tale. Thanks for the link.

[abigailb.livejournal.com]

still true, when you do the maths

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! I had half a feeling someone would produce evidence; but me, I am a slave to popular factoids. (So of course are other people, some of whom are readers; 'tis pity I can't supply a link to this article from the line, because people will still trip over it. But hey...)

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

This is going to annoy me now - isn't there a classic novel that starts with something similat (or even the opposite?). I'm thinking Clarke.

Ah, and I'm thinking "Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." 2001

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

Everyone else is being thoughtful. I keep wondering if slippery words are easy to get out of carpets. I want to play slip-slide on a carpet full of spilled words until they're all shiny and polished.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

The numbers depend on 'dead what' exactly. Species is a dubious biological concept these days, like life and death and ancestry, so if you count our longfathers back to bacteria, the number of dead becomes quite substantial.

The number of future living for 'always' is also a bit variable, depending on when you assume we'll go extinct :-)

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps she would have used the words 'ancestors' rather than 'dead' - 'our ancestors outnumber us', which since it involves multiple counting, one ancestor being the progenitor of many children, will always be true, no matter how numerous the living!

Simon M

[(Anonymous)]

(btw, yes, I am still alive... but not very)

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

This is somewhat at a tangent, and probably quite useless to you, but in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter an epithet attached to Hades is 'the ruler over many'.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't trip over it, sounds perfectly logical to me, especially in a non-modern setting, sure there are billions of people in our world *now* but a lot fewer in times past so for your setting it seems perfectly fine. Sorry the extra thinking meant it got displaced and fuzzy, rotten sleep stealing subtleties!