Prompt #4, blog #2

It’s fascinating how often nature repeats itself, especially so when we consider that two incidents that seem wholly individual yet nearly identical to each other can develop independently and be published nearly at the same time (such examples are found numerously in particle physics findings). We’ve all been in a situation in which two people have simultaneously cried out of some wholly individual epiphany or thought and have become shocked at their counterpart’s similar thought. My friends and I have, jokingly, deemed this imaginary place from which two or more people accidentally grab the same thought the “thought cloud.”

Permutations, like infinity, remain elusive to our brains and while we can’t even attempt to fathom the amount of variables that contribute to making, say, a language, a person, or even a book, much less the combinations that can result from those variables, there must come a point when something, somewhere repeats. Yet we keep adding variables to the equation. The same combination of genes could generate a wholly different person in the 1800’s and 2012, not least of all because we use computers and other forms of technology (and operate in a very different social system) that could not be imagined in the 1800’s. While I do believe that literature, like many other things, is often a new combination of essential basic components, I also feel it’s fair to acknowledge that new components are being added even daily. Foster addresses this way of building onto old basics by suggesting that all of being is part of “one story” and while I agree with him, I can’t help thinking he was a big fan of The NeverEnding Story.

When writing or reading a story, I believe it is best that one be able to embrace and search for allusions or structure, characters, et cetera that resemble those of another work. Like Foster notes, there’s a certain thrill in finding either an intentional or unintentional Easter Egg. The ability to participate in building on and refining the information we find valuable and immortalize in our texts is overwhelming and awe-inspiring. And having the opportunity to partake in a discussion of a topic both you and your counterpart are simultaneously inspired of is as equally initially intellectually stimulating as it is a mind-boggling concept of which to think.