ATD the norse/nunatak/serpent/odialesque thing

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Your observation dovetails very neatly with this passage, from p.820, ATD:

"If there is an inevitability to arrival by water, he reflected, as we watch the possibilities on shore being progressively narrowed at last to the destined quay or slip, there is no doubt a mirror-symmetry about departure, a denial of inevitability, an opening out from the point of embarkation, beginning the moment all lines are singled up, an unloosening of fate as the unknown and perhaps the uncreated begins to make its appearance ahead and astern, port and starboard, everywhere an expanding of possibilities, even for ship's company who may've made this run hundreds of times ..."

TRP starts the book by singling up the lines, then embarking on a trip to what might have been, with a couple of changes.

Laura  

-----Original Message-----
>From: John BAILEY <JBAILEY at theage.com.au>

My current thinking is that it ties in with the idea of History narrowing to inevitabilities, always a bad thing in P's writing, a field of possibilities always preferable to a necessity. All of the multiverse stuff, the co-existence of incommensurate worlds, genres, timeframes (AtD reminds of Nabokov's Ada in this regard) might seem like a bit of an abstract cop-out, imagining what could have been (but wasn't), but this emphasis on portals seems hint that between the open field of the past and the future, there are sometimes tiny narrow points we have to pass through, and when we come out the other side we'll be different, or at least feel ourselves to be entering a different landscape. You can't look back through these gates.