Invested in reading / invested by the difficulties

[Raphael Saltwood]

...good writing contains many times more meanings than a narrow reading gleans, so you have the Scylla of missing nuances, connotations

But there’s also the Charybdis of reading incompatible, extraneous, or simply wrong extensions into something

(Charybdis especially was the whirlpool one, so that relates to getting sucked into troubled waters)

Just translating into different English - paraphrasing for my own understanding & appreciation - involves ruling stuff out, visualizing, trying to apprehend a context & look for links, salient (also a military term) points -

Coming to a provisional understanding of a passage that you know a lot of work went into: background work, the stocking and stoking of the word hoard and vision; and the word choice, sequence & revisions - so that of a plethora of meanings & connotations that you *know* the author is aware of, this particular author uses multiple ones, maybe even all of them.

Stuff that anyone would notice, and maybe some things nobody else would notice (and the possibility that they aren’t intended) - like, does this passage’s reference to siegecraft


  *    which already has a nice two-edged nature, viz. the Candlebrow scholars are laying siege to the intellectual and engineering problems posed by Time, and
  *    Time is also laying siege to them, their heirs and assigns, their projects, etc
  *   And possibly a 3rd (using the more pedestrian meaning of “invested by” in the asset management sense): that Time is utilizing them for its own purposes
  *   Or that some Power beyond time and humanity is utilizing both of them for an even more complex project?

bear any narratively significant relation to another point made to the Chums by Gaspereaux?

He said,
“Among historians you’ll find a theory that crusades begin as holy pilgrimages....But introduce to your sacred project the element of weaponry and everything changes. Now you need not only a destination but an enemy as well.”

For me, the extraneous considerations of the other seekers are those of crusaders, whereas Merle and his fellow tinkers are pilgrims to the extent that their purely technical interests don’t - at least at the outset - revolve around changing other people’s lives.

The paraprosdokian - or, “paraprosdokian-plus” is that the surprise intensification effect of “invested in, invested by” isn’t limited to a reversal, but opens out into multiple possibilities

And the ways in the book in which the spirit of pure inquiry exemplified in Merle is co-opted into projects  with horrific results like the Vormance Expedition, or Kit’s fascination with flight into dive bombing...

And the “flattening out” of the idea of manipulating Time itself into the achievable simulacra of film, radio, tv, recordings, which (as rereaders) we know will draw  Merle into its ambit.

& in fact the graphite connotations of the “anharmonic pencils” that come into the tale hereabouts allude to yet another form of representation, “time-binding” (imho)(besides probably having a more mathematical set of connotations as well)

The attempts to revisit past times partially fulfilled; the desire to revise them still “under attack” (with perhaps a suggestion that a more peaceful, pilgrim-like approach is what’s needed)

All of which and more is implied in the passage, imho, with laudable panache.


So great respect for trying in a different language.

Thanks and kudos for sharing OED meaning #5!