-------- Original Message --------
Dear Jansy,
I think we have a source for this metaphor
> JM: I must set down on my original understanding before I feel
ready to
> change it! I always thought that "vast obscure unfinished
masterpiece" was
> a book written by the gods and which, like minute ants moving on a
world
> atlas, we are reading piecemeal while "making comments about our
particular
> strip of experience" ( fatalism is absent because the "masterpiece
is
> unfinished"...) You think that the abstruse poem is Pale Fire,
either
> Shade's or his Creator's, i.e:Nabokov. So,we, as readers, are the
afterlife
> of what occurs "inside the book" . Are we then not trapped by a
> Moebius-band "circularity", where there is no outside/inside and
afterlife
> is now?.
in these famous words by John Donne (maybe he used some earlier source
but his version is very impressive)
For whom the Bell Tolls
John Donne
From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento
Sonitu
Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to
me:
Thou must die."
(...)
And when she [the Catholic church] buries a man, that action concerns
me:
all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one
chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better
language;
and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several
translators;
some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some
by
justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall
bind up
all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall
lie
open to one another.
(...)