The Istoriaphile’s Corner

I love rivers. With all respect to ponds, pools, lakes, and oceans, I love being by a river the most.  Landlocked on two sides, it’s still a continuum of water that chuckles as it moves and brings down the heat in summer.  My rivers are peaceful most of the time but the last thing they are is boring, not only because they hold so much life but they seem to be living creatures themselves.  I guess I see life as a river. More than anything, all rivers are made up of water, great googolplexes of H2O molecules, all moving in the same direction. Some of the droplets came up from underground springs, some fell into place with a rainfall, but the source isn’t what’s important here.  What’s important is that once those droplets meet up it’s hard to tell one from another and they impact each other.  It may be on a scale too small for us to see but the molecules of water bump against each other on the way to their common destination.  And each encounter changes the path of each droplet, however minutely. I think all life is like that.  Our lives are continually changed every day by…

I’ve been thinking about pinch points lately, those intervals in a story when you realize how difficult the hero’s task is.  They occur (optimally) at the 3/8th and 5/8th point in a story and structurally, they serve a two-fold purpose: to show how vulnerable the hero(ine) is and what will happen if he/she loses.  But structure never interests me as much as character and pinch points teach and clarify these better than anything else. The same thing is true about people. Pinch points are what we learn in the worst of times. The axiom says failure teaches more than success and the essence of a pinch point is failure.  For example, the first pinch point of LOTR’s The Fellowship of the Ring happens at Weathertop, when Frodo succumbs to temptation and puts on the Ring.  He becomes vulnerable to Sauron’s most powerful agents, the Nazgul, and the resulting injury nearly destroys our hero.  Frodo never fully recovers from the experience but both the reader and he learn from it. Frodo shows a resilience and physical fortitude after the injury that most other beings don’t possess. And his character is strengthened after the failure. Strong as they are, the Nazgul never successfully distract…

A friend of mine died this week. A brain aneurysm no one knew she had ruptured without warning.  She lost consciousness and passed away days later without ever regaining it.  She was only 51. The morning after she passed away, I kept checking her Facebook page, hoping someone would post a retraction. Oh God, I wanted someone  to post a retraction. But they didn’t.  They can’t. My friend is gone and she isn’t coming back. Emotional pain on this level leaves me barely able to function at first.  I spent the first day wandering around in shock and crying.  I wanted to tell someone but I couldn’t decide who to call.   There were  colleagues we had worked with years ago but how do you call someone, out of the blue, and say, “By the way, a woman you haven’t seen in years died yesterday.  Thought you’d like to know.”  I wanted to buttonhole strangers and say they’d missed knowing someone wonderful.  I wanted to share the pain. I couldn’t. After I came home, frustrated and grieving, I looked up an essay William Allen White wrote when his sixteen year old daughter, Mary, died unexpectedly.  Like my friend, Mary White…

There’s a shiver I get when I first pick up certain books.  Reading is almost an autonomic function for me and nothing is more inviting than the site of a new, fat book but every so often I will pick up a book, read a few pages and get the “Aha” kind of shiver.   It’s a reflex of recognition, when my eyes fix on some indefinable thing that says this book is really something special.  This is one of those books that seems to walk and talk under its own power and will become a beloved friend.  This book will transcend its time and be loved by people for centuries.  This one is a classic.  Other people have already awarded that title to The Bridge to Terabithia but I didn’t know that until I picked up the book.   The shiver told me everything. For one thing, it’s so universal.  Every kid that ever went to school has lived in one of two camps.  Either you have been the new kid in class, like Leslie Burke or you are Jess Aarons, who has never been the new kid.  Either status has its own brand of hell.  The new kid is supposed…