Bran was an ancient British hero with whom the bards identified Arthur, perhaps because Bran bore the title Arddu ("the Dark One," pronounced Arthū), and had a shrine at Glastonbury. Bran, whose emblem was the raven, had been defeated by his twin Beli in a certain "Battle of the Trees," and his head buried on Tower Hill, London, where ravens are still protected as a good-luck charm.
In former manufacturing hubs like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis and Pittsburgh, the largest employers are colleges, universities and hospitals. This is seemingly good news—it means, at least, that residents of these cities can find work. But according to my team's analysis, high concentrations of these sectors do not bode well for cities' economies. ... The more creative class members take jobs in education and health care, the lower their region's wages tend to be.
Slowly and inexorably, New Thought replaced the clean-living credo of American success—early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise—with an enticing new principle: He who believes he can, can.
jhongosh replies...
It seems to me that this was a change for the worse, from placing emphasis on hard work to the idea that thinking and believing is enough. I think a great number of people in our generation suffer from overthinking and never actually accomplishing anything.
lapilofu replies...
Agh, you're so right it hurts.
Babies learn that their own movements can cause action. They can pull a string attached to a mobile. If a ribbon is tied to the baby's foot and the other end to a mobile, they rapidly learn to kick and so make the mobile turn; a week later they will still remember how to do it. But when you disconnect the ribbon they continue to kick. Piaget called this a magical action, as they coo and smile at the mobile at the same time in order, probably, he thought, to get it to move. They are acquiring causal beliefs. Piaget's studies on children led him to a conclusion that at an early stage in their development they had what he called feelings of participation in natural events that were accompanied by magical beliefs. The child's movements make the sun move, and the wind obey them. Who, they ...
I'm only through what is effectively the "introduction" of this novel, setting up the dark and stormy night from which Gage tells his story, but it's already excellent. The language, like in Wicked, is rich and thick with tradition and mystery. I'm really looking forward to getting enough spare time to finish this one—and it's likely that I'll craft time out of nothing just to do so.
As an aside, individualism is a particularly Western way of questing, according to scholar Joseph Campbell, who traces it back to the Knights of the Round Table. When the knights were sent out to look for the Holy Grail, they were instructed to go forth making their own paths into the forest. Campbell points to this as a mythological call to independent seeking rather than to following a path set out by others.
The third bridge from the mundane to the magical is even more religious. I call it the way of the rebellious disciple. I've noticed that a certain type of person, often a young man, pursues spiritual questions with unusual tenacity and fervor. They read every book that promises wisdom, quest for every answer that seems promising, debate every believer, and push themselves to great extremes. Many go from one religion to another before finally finding something that seems to fit. Often they are so versed in different paths and so iconoclastic that they put together various aspects of different faiths to carve their own unique path.
Before we ended our conversations, realizing that Siva knew quite a bit about elves, vampires, fairies, and other magical creatures, I asked him if he knew why people thought themselves to be such entities. His explanation was the clearest and most reasonable one I heard. He suggested that they might be people, like himself, without a strong personality or ego. Perhaps they hadn't been allowed to role-play enough in their early life. Fastening onto a role of great magical intensity might be a way of finding some self worth being, he said.
"Colonial Americans were, in fact, more likely to turn to magical or occult techniques in their effort to avail themselves of superhuman power than they were to Christian rituals or prayers," writes religion scholar Robert C. Fuller. ...Church membership at the start of the [American] Revolution was 17 percent, a figure so low that some scholars suggest that schoolroom pictures of American Puritans going to church ought to be joined by paintings of drunken revelers.
This book, written before the advent of the modern novel, reads like the Old Testament, with list upon list of, "There was this guy and he did this. And there was this guy and he did this. And this guy..." and very little in the way of description of place, mood or character.
lapilofu replies...
Yeah, I was supposed to read this for a class in high school and I couldn't muscle through it.