Semi-Random Reflections

Read time: 2 mins.

An edited excerpt from my work-in-progress novel The Song and the Tempest.

Nasrin examines her journal from the relevant time period, a wood-covered volume of vellum. The tome hovers before her face, pages rapidly flipping. Nothing appears of the incident she has in mind. In fact, she finds five empty pages where the episode should go.

For the first time she wonders just how much of her history she’s left unrecorded. She wrote down what she thought would concern her later, but did she mispredict that? She wants to believe she captured the really foundational moments, the ones that somehow shaped her, but does anyone ever really know what shapes them as it happens?

Also, how long do formative experiences truly stay formative?

Perhaps that particular incident shaped a past version of her, but she suspects it has little to do with her present self. If a clay urn, still wet, gets dropped halfway to the kiln so that the potter has to revert it to a shapeless clump and remold it, did the spins it took on the pottery wheel before the drop still shape the final urn? Surely the post-drop spins have more to do with the urn’s eventual form. Unless one argues that the pre-drop spins were the very things that brought about the drop, and, by extension, the post-drop spins couldn’t have happened without the pre-drop spins. Maybe the potter wouldn’t have dropped the urn if they hadn’t worn out their hands on too much molding. Anyway, none of it could happen at all without reaching even further back to the moment the potter dug the mud out of the earth, to say nothing of how the mud got there or how the potter learned pottery.

A strange feeling, to recognize one’s whole self as resulting from an imponderable Gordian knot of diverging experiential chains, the links of which reach into a void of forgotten, unknowable moments. How can anyone ever know why they do what they do?

Probably the same way people teach pottery without mentioning the birth of the universe.