Literary pregnancy quotes

Someone recently posted about why literary people disdain the Reacher novels, but there are some critics writing about Reacher in reasonably literary ways, including novelist and nonfiction writer John Lanchester reviewing Night School in The New Yorker in 2016.
In typical New Yorker fashion, Lanchester takes a broader view of the novel and the novelist, essentially writing a thumbnail feature on Child and his fictional creation.
Some quotes:
[Reacher is] a good guy who is, with his penchant for violence, very close to being a bad guy. His code is chivalric, in the sense that he fights on behalf of the good; sometimes this means the weak and the wronged, sometimes this means the U.S. government or its proxies. His actions, though, are as unchivalric as they come. He executes opponents, kicks people when they’re down. If he gets a chance to shoot someone in the back rather than the front, he takes it. He may be a hero, but he’s a realist, too.
He is an existential hero, the apotheosis of the lone stranger, travelling the Lower Forty-eight with nothing but his folding toothbrush and his code.
Lanchester describes the unplanned, make it up as you go along writing process Child employs. After writing this first sentence of Make Me:
Moving a guy as big as Keever wasn’t easy. It was like trying to wrestle a king-size mattress off a waterbed. So they buried him close to the house. Which made sense anyway. The harvest was still a month away, and a disturbance in a field would show up from the air. And they would use the air, for a guy like Keever.
Reading the opening as it was being written, Martin [Andy Martin, who shadowed Child for the entire writing of Make Me] asked Child a question: Who is Keever? Child’s answer: “I’ve no idea at this point.”
Here we get the stupefying, almost impossible-to-credit explanation of how Child captures the texture of Reacher’s thinking: because it’s his thinking, too. He isn’t giving the impression that he’s figuring out a mystery; he’s actually figuring out a mystery. In Martin’s account, Child was about two-thirds through the writing of “Make Me” before he realized what the bad guys were doing.
Lots of good stuff in the piece, including some backstory on Sergeant Neagley:
Frances L. Neagley is named for a reader who won a charity auction at the mystery conference Bouchercon.

The term "Naturalism" is a broad term (sometimes even as a synonym to nudism) but even when narrowed exclusively to authors, the term covers some wide ground.
First, there is literary naturalism, the school of Jack London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Herman Melville, and some selected others. The meld between realism and romance, some say. McCarthy fits in here and merges with some other divides.
Then there are naturalists, including nature lovers and professional environmentalists, and this category also includes agrarians. My favorites among these are Wendell Barry, Rick Bass, Edward Abbey, Gary Paulsen, Gene Hill, John Graves Jim Harrison, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and many others.
Some of those in the latter category, including Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Cormac McCarthy, have a philosophy of naturalism as well. And this philosophy of naturalism is in turn divided in several categories, including among those who believe in human exceptionalism and those who do not see any dividing line between humans and the earth's other animals. I used to argue for the animal side, but since reading Michael Denton's THE MIRACLE OF MAN: THE FINE TUNING OF NATURE FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE, I find myself agreeing and firmly on the side of human exceptionalism and metaphysical naturalism.
But how did Cormac McCarthy view and write about naturalism?
My recommended sources here include:
1, Most importantly for Cormac McCarthy the Pagan Platonist, The Mystery of Matter: Nonlocality, Morphic Resonance, Synchronicity and the Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas by James Arraj. This is a gem which connects so much in McCarthy's books, showing that Aristotle took Plato's use of forms a step further, mentioning the stamp or die of the coldforger without tying it to McCarthy, but the ties are there. An important--at times amazing--book from an author I had never heard of before. The naturalism of St. Thomas Aquinas is the best description of Cormac McCarthy's naturalism to be found anywhere, naturally metaphysical.
2. NARRATIVE NATURALISM: AN ALTERNATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR PHILOSOPHY OF MIND by Jessica Wahman. Cormac McCarthy, in his Nautilus article on consciousness, alluded to the origin of language, the "this can be that" formation of it. In the beginning was the WORD, as Genesis says, but that goes back to the oldest works in Sanskrit, as Roberto Calasso showed us in KA. Douglas Hofstadter showed us that too in such stellar works as Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. Words equate to numbers, analogies equate to equations, algorithms equate to narratives.
3. Richard Rorty's PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE.
4. Victorino Tejera's TWO METAPHYISCAL NATURALISMS: ARISTOTLE AND JUSTUS BUCHLER.
5. UNGUESSED KINSHIPS: NATURALISM AND THE GEOGRAPHY OF HOPE IN CORMAC MCCARTHY by Steven Frye. The author may be among the horde who dislike me and my posts, but I have long considered him one of the very top of McCarthy scholars in the Cormac McCarthy Society. For one thing, he sees McCarthy's admonitions against addiction in his books, to which most seem blind. For another thing, I like his take on naturalism here.
6. Owen Flanagan's THE BODHISATTVA'S BRAIN: BUDDHISM NATURALIZED, which merges Naturalism with a cherry-picked Buddhism. Excellent.
7. ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM: A RESEARCH COMPANION, edited by Martin Hahnel. This valuable anthology includes many different takes but the one I liked best was Kathi Beier's "ALADAIR MACINTYRE'S THOMISTIC-ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM." I liked them all, rather, but Beier's essay fits Cormac McCarthy best.
8. Julius Greve's SHRED OF MATTER: CORMAC MCCARTHY AND THE CONCEPT OF NATURE. I really liked this, but it doesn't quite fit with the others here. Make no mistake, Greve's is a thinker and a McCarthy scholar quoting other McCarthy scholars, but going his own way with Lorenz Oken and especially with Friedrich Schelling's works on Naturphilosophie.
9. Paul Feyerabend's PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, from an unpublished manuscript by Feyerabend. An interesting man with an interesting wide-reaching point of view.

I'm extremely tired. There might be a palpable level of incoherence.
Why should the truth matter?
I've written, no doubt, tens of thousands of words defending what I don't observe to be a prima facie obvious answer. The cultural instinct is to challenge the word "obvious," and immediately seek to make the discussion abstract or obscure. It doesn't matter how many practically applicable circumstances we ground the discussion in, the drive is to fundamentally suppress the truth.
Quick examples. The whole of law requires you to swear to tell the truth upon penalties of perjury. Journalists and whistleblowers are routinely killed for revealing often "boring" or "matter-of-fact" information about the corrupt systems within which they reside. There's no more familiar and tolerated root-for-the-victim scenario than when someone cheats in their relationship; entire networks have been built on the back of watching people weaponize and dance upon hearing the test results. The consequences of not having money for a necessities are immediately felt.
If you can say nothing else about the truth, it's that in its immediate expression, we believe it's going to be painful. Therefore, it has to be buttressed against something in order to maintain or measure our confidence that it exists altogether.
Are you willing to go to jail or be fined for, importantly, getting caught lying? For many people, yes, so good luck keeping that as your sole metric or practice for eliciting the desired truth. Are you willing to die to expose the nature of your government or corporation? For most people? Fuck no, and the ones that do often see their effort paid lip service to with no consequences. I can tell you as a literal counselor that functionally nobody is seriously examining the nature of their romantic attachments, as the second they do it's akin to inviting Jerry Springer into their living room.
These examples, more specifically in their celebrated failings, are what we train our expectations on. The truth comes with externally imposed punishment, is ignored, or is exploited. Where does the truth exist, if it does so at all in these scenarios? Or stated another way, what can be said that's most true, or least wrong, about them? Here we beg the contribution of emotions. Here we're introduced to the concept of "emotional truths" that are used explicitly to justify, obscure, denounce, or exploit the truth.
The truth, without quotes, includes and incorporates the feedback and consequences of emotions, without supercharging them. You can understand intuitively why someone would lie on a witness stand, cover up the money or weapons they steal, and pretend you are or aren't the father. You can matter-of-factly state that for any given conscious individual from now unto the rest of existence, those behaviors are immoral, unjust, and reliant upon dodging the many damning truths associated with that behavior. You can easily understand the benefits; monetarily, socially, and psychologically of suppressing the world that otherwise deliberately attempts to account for the consequences.
But we're only at the first level of abstraction. These are the most obvious and easy to understand scenarios. One might even try to argue for forgiveness and leniency for dipping into unhealthy behavioral places when it comes to matters needing court intervention or implicating the most powerful and resource-ridden people on the planet. It gets subtlety and dramatically worse.
We formalize and institutionalize lying. We build it into our concepts of connection, health, doing business, getting educated, and being entertained. We bake so many lies into the patterns our brains adopt, it is all-but literally impossible to maintain an eye or ear for what's actually true. If you're not formally instructed in logic or scientifically rigorous or habitually breaking apart your language and behavior and attempting to reassemble them in service to reliably repeatable pieces, you're at sea. You are at the mercy of the waves, weather, and floating device you may or may not conceive of as a seaworthy vessel.
Of course, here "emotional truth," with ingrained fluidity, does the heavy lifting to sweep in and deny the desperate truth of your circumstances. You don't feel adrift. In fact, you have an amazing story of not just the family you have, money you've made, planned vacation, hobbies and friends, but you're also deeply passionate and informed about the things someone of your cast and capacity should be.
Be on the lookout, because that's the pattern. Invariably, my clients lead with the, "It's embarrassing and confusing why I'm even here" story. They tell me all the good things they have going for them. They land on repeated choice cliches they've adopted, unconsciously, as justifying tools that obstruct the ability to fully account and otherwise infinitely impede the capacity to change.
Your feelings are the foundational lie. You don't allow yourself to accept them, and the truth of how powerfully they influence your thoughts and behavior. As a result, you build mega-structures of insecure pride.
I get exhausted by religious apologists for this reason. A 60 Minutes interviewer ass-kissing the Pope really honed in the feeling recently. It's emotionally gratifying for your modern cosplaying Catholic to celebrate the extremely moderate dance he's engaged with regard to homosexuality and bare-minimum response to fucking children.
I recognize when I'm tempted to make similar moves in my own life. The lazier I feel, I try to remind myself of how much I've accomplished and how I'm living within many of the desired goals and parameters I set out to achieve. The truth is that no matter what I accomplish, the second I dismiss or downplay my need to develop larger and even-more needing of accounting goals, I'm suffering sea sickness. If I lose sight of how much I'm explicitly not trying to be "happy" or "comfortable," I'm not "Nick P." anymore. I'm an antagonist. I'm an experimenter. I'm a creative. I'm explicitly and habitually attempting to consciously repudiate that which I find is fucking with me.
The truth hurts because it has to. You can't maintain healthy muscles if you're unwilling to feel them sore. You can't train your ability to register and respond to emotions if you don't entertain how they induce your crazy-making instincts. At bottom, you are no better than a wild animal that lashes out in predictably wild ways. We smugly joke about lion's eating faces while dismissing the smell of constantly shitting on our own rugs. It's all reliably animal all the way down.
I consider myself a considerably better-than-average truth teller solely because I do this. I look for understanding and to organize something I only had a tired and discombobulated notion of. I emotionally detach and release myself from the obligation to protect myself from any emotional response the exploration brings up. I can speak in a measured way about ongoing sources of misery, loci of failure, and dare myself to respond proactively to an otherwise endless bemoaning of circumstances. I'm both willing and excited to discuss and describe every single facet of my relationships and behavior in the most damning and forgiving terms.
The truth is the fluid complicated mix of both stories. Incorporating and resolving the learned behavior to emotionally placate instead of doing the work to form accountable narratives is the best place any one of us can arrive. Perfect is off the table. "Your truth" and "my truth" get ridiculed as the unearned faith-claims they are. The real nature of the pain and harm of floating along on a precariously placed raft of presumptions becomes strikingly clear. It will hit you as violently as the cuffs around your wrist, the pregnancy test results, or the fist of your "true love" who may control whether you live or die.
And what is touted as the most noble thing any one of us could do but to die for what we believe in? We pretend a mother fucker that comes back to life is a proper sacrifice! We pretend suicide bombers and your average everyday ideologue doesn't believe what they ritualize and chant! Sometimes I think we apologize for the faithful because we're jealous we can't be so irrationally convicted. You feel obligated to justify, infinitely, everything we kill within ourselves to protect the loudest and comfortably familiar lies.
If you don't, do you still have friends and family? Are the bills getting paid? Are you staying alive to any degree someone would desire to be so?
You are obligated, every minute of every day, to lie. To practice the party lines and be practical. To protect the familiar and those vulnerable to the dangerous and nasty suggestions from people like me to pull back and watch closer, or pull out altogether. You can't leave an environment you can't conceptualize. You can't consciously and deliberately change circumstances you don't recognize as both fluidly probabilistic and perfectly predictable. Until you do, your words and actions aren't really yours. Your feelings won't properly match what you're talking about or professing to create or strive for.
That is, it's not a mystery or secret to me why the story you tell yourself about who you are, what you have, or what you care about leaves you feeling empty, exhausted, or filled with dread. I know you're lying. I know how you're lying. I can take every single word or sentence you've used incorrectly and describe how it's actually the opposite in how it manifests. Do you feel your "emotional truth" bristling to sweep in again? Aren't you eager, so eager, right now to deny my faux super power? That's the real nature of your god, to protect you from what isn't actually even an attack. It just feels like it.

I made every wrong decision possible and the biggest one being is staying with the man I’m now married to. Being a naive hopeless romantic I really thought I knew what love marriage and being a good wife meant. I thought I had the right training and understanding to do my part. I’ve been with this man since 2015 we got married February this year and in the 1st week I got called a bad wife. Not bc I actually did something deserving of it. Only that he didn’t like my demeanor or what I said. I honestly don’t even remember what I said.
We have two sons 20 months and 10 months. We fought like cats and dogs bc he didn’t comprehend pregnancy hormones postpartum was 100000x bc now that’s there’s no baby in me I should be fine. I now have severe ppd/ppa/ppr yaaay. He dismisses my needs of softness and is always rough mouthed with me. So guess what I reciprocate you go low I go to hell. Simple. He thinks that he can act, say, do, whatever he wants with no consequences. I make sure to carry out the consequences with firm conviction. If he doesn’t go out of his way to make me happy why should I?
He’s so selfish and really it seems that he’s ashamed of me. But what is there to be ashamed. I’m not ugly fat or short not that any of those are an issue. I speak more than 2 languages I’m well travelled well educated(ignore the grammatical errors I’m too lazy to fix them) my mom is a doctor and my dad is a self made millionaire. I’ve been trained to cook by chefs I’ve been taught to sew and crochet quite well. Started my own business I’m highly accomplished in my career. But to him I’m a nobody a loser a helpless baby. I was raised in church and surrounded by actual missionaries so I was taught about being generous giving loving kind sweet graceful etc. I try to do what I’m taught but he gets in my way always stopping me saying that’s not my problem. I wanted to help a friend in need and he quoted that.
He makes me feel like me wanting to be doted on is burdensome. I have lost all respect for him. He doesn’t love or respect me. I can’t leave right now bc I have nowhere to go. I just lost my job Mother’s Day weekend bc of him. He said I didn’t strategize my life enough. I was salary so he felt that I should work at night and juggle the babies in the day. I am an insurance adjuster I deal with disaster literally daily I have to be available for calls. I need to be undistracted to conduct investigations do repair estimate crate home sketches. It’s not sustainable. He is live on calls all day so it was on me to be a full time working from home stay at home mom.
We both work from home and when I got pregnant I told him we would need help. He dismissed me vehemently. He took off work for a few months to help with baby while I was working and pregnant with baby 2. I still had to cook go grocery shopping maintain the list of needs in the home. All he did was clean play with baby and video games. Nothing of what he promised(book reading taking baby to park/walks, setting a schedule for baby) he blamed me.
He doesn’t want people in the house bc that’s his sanctuary. He has multiple bedrooms but I’m only allowed in the master suite. His brother gets the other side of the house which the remaining rooms bathroom extra dining/living room area. But the brother is living out of the state. The kids sleep in our room my office was in our room and we have two 85” tvs in our bedroom that take up most the room. So yeah imagine 2 cribs a king size bed a 55” desk with three 24” screens, two 85” tvs all in one room.
We need a new car and have needed one since 2022(car is too small for our family)he blames me and said I didn’t save money so he could buy us a car. He bought a house with his brother while dating me and then blames me for us not having a house together. He treats his twin brother like he’s his wife. It’s really weird.
He so insecure about everything regarding me. I can’t have a social media presence bc why does the world need to see my family and know my life. I can’t have male friends bc all they want is a chance. I can hardly go out without being clocked or him calling/facetime to check on me. God forbid FaceTime doesn’t get answered but a phone call does now I’m with someone. I can’t take too long shopping bc what is taking me so long I must be hanging out with someone. Mind you I’m a label reader and a bargain hunter. It’s never just in and out when I’m shopping.
He has an opinion on EVERYTHING and doesn’t understand why he can’t speak freely (freedom of speech is just that; it doesn’t mean freedom of consequence). He put me down constantly gives back handed compliments nothing from him to me shoes genuine love. Just here stfu already you happy ugh. When he proposed to me he literally just said here and with an open box at midnight. I’m like uh do it right a-hole. He begrudgingly got on one knee and did the thing. Then proceeded to demand to see my dms of every social media account and then we got into a huge fight bc I had males I was talking to on there. Here’s the kicker if he actually paid attending he would’ve seen these men helped me with my career and were sponsoring me to get hired.
One would think he’s ugly short broke etc but he’s not. He’s beautiful tall well built has a house several cars no extra babies no felonies and a career. I don’t feel appreciated in anything I do for it. I’ve wanted to do some much with this man but he stops me and just says we need to save money. Mind you he would blow bands on his Audi for repairs at the dealership. To add insult to injury my father and brother are legitimate master mechanics who would’ve fixed his car for 3% of what he’s paid. Till this day the Audi sits dead in our driveway. “He saving it as our 1 year old’s 1st car”. 🙄 we need a new car but there are six cars on the lot only 3 function there rest are dead two are Audis. He won’t sell or fix them is just a pride thing to see a lot of cars on his driveway.
Anyway I really thought he was a force to be reckoned with when I met him but ignored so many red flags he was better than I what I was dealing with or so I thought. I downgraded myself to make him complain less about me and yet he complains even more. I just want this over I’m tired. If you made it this far thank you for reading my rant. Let me get back to this man child. In the time that It took me to write this he’s pestered me 4x and even accused me of slandering him to someone. I can’t win…..deep negro spiritual sigh
Psa: I’m black Latina and he purebred Jamaican
Edit:To fussy grammar police there I made paragraphs.

I think fiction is underrated as a tool for understanding how we relate to ourselves and each other, something that’s especially important to explore in depth for people who have undergone traumatic experiences. These are some books and short stories that have helped me do that at different points in my life, arguably with some more success than some self help books marketed toward trauma survivors/people raised by parents like mine/people with my brain stuff (not that the advice is always or even usually bad, but the presentation misses the mark for me more often than not—Staci Haines is probably my fave at the moment, I’m really excited to read her book on the politics of trauma).
ANYWAY, in particular, I love fiction that uses otherworldly elements to shake up norms and assumptions, especially because I think that kind of dynamic is useful for articulating the effects of trauma, or the feeling of being apart from others in general—sometimes literally, and sometimes in very abstract ways. It also prompts reflection on individuals and systems, distributions of power & life chances, etc. without feeling preachy. I also like unreliable narrators and ambiguity, nonlinearity, stories within stories within stories, anything that resembles how my brain operates, really (Julia Miele Rodas conceptualizes this well in her book Autistic Disturbances but that’s literary theory and about autism so I didn’t put it on the list. Oh, but while I’m talking about theory, María Lugones’ Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes isn’t about trauma in specific (though it really kinda is) but it offered the mental reshuffle I needed to start implementing a lot of the skills I’d learned for recovery. I should really go back and finish it, whoops.)
Okay, enough of my yapping, here’s my truncated list. I’m putting it here more for the sake of having examples because I don’t think every text will resonate with every trauma survivor (duh ig), but if you decide to check any of these out, please please research the contents and use your best judgment—some of them include depictions of violence and SA, and all of them deal with sensitive themes (I guess they would have to to be on the list). Please ask me if you’re unsure about anything, I love talking about books I like, even if it’s just to give trigger warnings
I also would love to know whether anyone has a similar relationship to books or other media and what those titles are! I have a hard time finding new things to read because what I look for isn’t really identifiable by categories like genre, and looking up “books like ___” doesn’t usually get me where I want to be.
OKAY, here’s the list for real this time (short stories in quotes):
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
“Eckbert the Fair” by Ludwig Tieck
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
“The Mines of Falun” and “The Sandman” by ETA Hoffmann
“The Inn” by Mariana Enríquez
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (I shouldn’t waste my breath putting too much gothic lit on here you get the idea)
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
Pretty much anything by Kafka, including his diaries
“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen María Machado
Thank you for reading 💛💛💛
Edited formatting

There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men… these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey… I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back.”
“It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so.”
“You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners… Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run–‘In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game’.
Article link: https://lauraleeauthor.wordpress.com/2018/05/29/quotes-of-the-day-g-k-chesterton/

There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men… these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey… I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back.”
“It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so.”
“You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners… Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run–‘In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game’.
Article link: https://lauraleeauthor.wordpress.com/2018/05/29/quotes-of-the-day-g-k-chesterton/

Today, let's draw inspiration from the words of a literary mastermind:
"You can make anything by writing." - C.S. Lewis
Lewis's words remind us of the immense power and freedom within the act of writing. Whether it's crafting new worlds, exploring profound truths, or simply bringing joy, writing holds unlimited potential.
Writing isn't just a form of expression; it's creation itself. With each word, sentence, and story, writers mold realities that can inspire, challenge, and change perspectives.
Today's Mission:
Let this quote be your guiding light. Whenever you face writer's block or doubt your abilities, remember the power that resides in your pen. Dream big, write freely, and create the extraordinary. 💪
Challenge: Write a short piece that brings to life something you've always wanted to explore or express. Let C.S. Lewis's words spark your imagination.

It's essential to focus on continual improvement and resilience. Many successful authors faced rejection before achieving success. J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, received numerous rejections initially. Stephen King's first novel was rejected dozens of times. Agatha Christie, Dr. Seuss, and Margaret Mitchell all encountered rejection before finding success. Remember, rejection is a part of the journey, and perseverance in honing your craft is key. Focus on refining your writing, seeking feedback, and staying persistent in your pursuit.
Here are a few strategies to help navigate the journey as a writer:

1. Persistency: Keep writing and submitting your work. Each rejection can provide valuable lessons and insights into improving your writing. Don't let setbacks deter you from continuing to create.
   
2. Feedback and Improvement: Seek feedback from peers, writing groups, or mentors. Constructive criticism can help identify areas for improvement and guide your growth as a writer.
   
3. Diversify Submissions: Consider submitting your work to various publishers, agents, or literary magazines. Sometimes, a rejection from one might not reflect the response you'll receive from another.
   
4. Stay Motivated: Surround yourself with inspiration. Read books, attend writing workshops, or engage with other creatives to stay motivated and connected within the writing community.
   
5. Self-Care: Take care of your mental and emotional well-being. Rejections can be tough, so it's crucial to practice self-compassion and maintain a healthy perspective on your writing journey.
   

Remember, many renowned authors faced rejection before achieving success. Your persistence, dedication to improvement, and belief in your craft are vital elements that can lead you toward success as a writer.
6Here are a few more tips to help maintain motivation and progress as a writer:

1. Set Realistic Goals: Establish achievable writing goals. Whether it's a daily word count, finishing a chapter, or completing a manuscript by a specific deadline, setting realistic targets can keep you focused and motivated.
   
2. Embrace Revisions: Recognize that writing is rewriting. Embrace the revision process as an opportunity to polish your work. Revisions often lead to stronger storytelling and better-crafted prose.
   
3. Connect with the Writing Community: Engage with other writers through social media, forums, or local writing groups. Networking can provide support, encouragement, and valuable insights into the publishing industry.
   
4. Learn from Rejections: Instead of viewing rejections as failures, consider them as stepping stones toward success. Analyze feedback, if available, and use it constructively to refine your writing.
   
5. Believe in Your Voice: Each writer has a unique voice. Embrace your style and perspective. Authenticity in storytelling often resonates with readers.
   

Lastly, remember that every successful author faced challenges and setbacks along their journey. It's the perseverance, commitment to improvement, and belief in their work that helped them overcome rejection and achieve success. Keep writing, stay resilient, and believe in your potential as a writer.
Here are quotes from some well-known authors who faced rejection before finding success:

1. J.K. Rowling (Author of Harry Potter series):
   

   "Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me."
   

2. Stephen King (Author of numerous bestsellers):
   

   "By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing."
   

3. Agatha Christie (Renowned mystery novelist):
   

   "I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble."
   

4. Dr. Seuss (Author of beloved children's books):
   

   "I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living. It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope."
   

5. Margaret Mitchell (Author of "Gone with the Wind"):
   

   "Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect. We take what we get and are thankful it's no worse than it is."
   

These authors encountered rejection and setbacks on their paths to success but persisted in their writing endeavors, ultimately achieving acclaim for their work. Their quotes reflect their resilience, determination, and belief in their craft despite facing initial rejection.
Here are a few more quotes from authors who experienced rejection before achieving success:

1. Louisa May Alcott (Author of "Little Women"):
   

   "I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."
   

2. George Orwell (Author of "1984" and "Animal Farm"):
   

   "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
   

3. John Grisham (Bestselling author of legal thrillers):
   

   "I faced rejection and constant criticism, but I never let up. I continued to persevere and pursued my writing passion."
   

4. Madeleine L'Engle (Author of "A Wrinkle in Time"):
   

   "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
   

5. Ray Bradbury (Author of "Fahrenheit 451"):
   

   "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
   

These authors persisted through rejection, adversity, and doubts, yet remained dedicated to their writing. Their words reflect the perseverance, passion, and determination that ultimately led them to success in the literary world.
💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫💫🐔🐔🐔🐔 So in handling rejection as a writer and finding inspiration from authors who faced rejection before achieving success, this article has provided:

1. Strategies to stay motivated and improve as a writer, including persistence, seeking feedback, diversifying submissions, staying motivated, and practicing self-care.
2. Additional tips like setting goals, embracing revisions, connecting with the writing community, learning from rejections, and embracing your unique voice.
3. Quotes from various renowned authors such as J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Dr. Seuss, Margaret Mitchell, Louisa May Alcott, George Orwell, John Grisham, Madeleine L'Engle, and Ray Bradbury. These quotes highlight their resilience, determination, and belief in their craft despite facing rejection, ultimately leading to their success as authors.

The overarching message is to persist in writing, seek improvement, learn from setbacks, stay connected with the writing community, and believe in your unique voice as a writer, drawing inspiration from the experiences of successful authors who overcame rejection on their paths to success.

I don’t like the word ‘career’ it’s too Grey and big business.
Anyway I am trying to decide how I’m going to earn a living.
In my past I made silver jewellery (cast) with literary quotes on it and motifs and illustrations etc. I did all the making, photography, website and tags and packaging etc. my little business was very popular immediately and I could not keep up with demand for many years. I was then diagnosed/onset with bipolasza etc and had to quit it all.
I’m now trying to reestablish it, but with my illness now and poor sleep always etc I don’t feel like I’d be able to do it as well. I have outsourced the making to someone else but I still feel not really passionate about jewellery anymore. It’s more I earned so well from it before. I also like researching literary things and poetry for the business.
I also before everything use to sell my paintings (I’m an artist) they always sold and for good sums but now I’m on heavy psych meds and it’s much harder to paint 🎨 the ideas no longer flood me, the creative force or drive is no longer there. But I still push through and actually I’m painting more than I ever have. Yesterday I finally did a painting like my old paintings. Tbh I feel like being a painter is what I would prefer to do, and I go to art exhibitions of artist friends and galleries a lot. I feel like that is more suited to the wayward mind I have now. And many artists are of this ilk. I follow living artists on Insta too. But I do feel my talents have really really wavered from the meds. I can’t imagine on them either. I feel like nothing is propelling me anymore with art and jewellery designs. But if I paint at night it seems to be ok.
I would say I’m a bohemian sort of person, never really tried to pursue ordinary life. I want to buy a tiny house (which I can) tinyhouses and live in the countryside. So my living costs would be low, and I choose the simple life because I love it but because it would also allow me a creative life.
I would appreciate any wisdom. Sorry it’s so long!

The main events take place in the summer of 2023, but before that there’s some pretty crucial information you need to know.
Many moons ago, three or four years before I was forced to live with the burden of knowing my dear friend, some shit went down.
Sophomore year of high school, Heather and my now boyfriend Tony were besties with another girl, that I will call Jane (the sweetest person I’ve ever met, by the way). At some point, Jane and her boyfriend went on a break, and Heather decided, for some reason to this day unknown, to try and sext her best friend’s ex boyfriend. I say “try” because he never really indulged her, which made the whole situation all the more embarrassing. Heather, however, lacking self-awareness and critical thinking skills, decided to keep this up for over five months, after which Jane and her ex got back together, and he told her everything. Contrary to Heather, Jane decided to be a good friend and wait for Heather to come clean about her actions without revealing she already knew everything.
And so she waited. But Heather never said anything.
Keep this in mind, it’ll be important later.
Fast forward to February 2022, yours truly is introduced on the scene by becoming Heather’s roommate during our first year of college. Surprisingly we got along pretty well, we became really close friends in a very short time. She was also the extroverted one (also important) of the two and really helped me come out of my shell, so for a while I was really grateful to her. Anyway, throughout the three months we lived together she was constantly talking about her friends Tony and Jane from back home, but especially referring to Jane as her best friend, the only one that really knew her and that she really trusted.
Her friend Tony was also a very popular topic in conversations, and the reason she convinced me to visit her home country that summer, which resulted in us dating but I will spare you the details of that because it’s a different story (although a good one too).
The summer ends. She moves back to her country, I go back to mine, now pursuing two long distance relationships, the one with my boyfriend and the one with my only friend. So, in January 2023 plan a trip there with Tony but I decide not to tell Heather, and to let it be a surprise instead.
This is where the thing I told you to remember comes back for the first time, and I get front row seats for this years-long conflict finally unraveling.
Jane decided she had enough of waiting for her friend to become decent and slowly started growing apart from Heather, who had actually started the fight by accusing Jane of ignoring her.
When asked about the reasons for her behavior, some of Heather’s responses were, and I kid you not, “BRO I HAD A PLAN” and “IT’S LITERALLY NOT MY PROUDEST MOMENT”.
So. Yeah. Needless to say, they stopped being friends.
Now, for some reason, Heather decided to start this fight on the groupchat with my boyfriend, which meant I had access to everything, and after learning about everything I started to question my friend’s actions for the first time. Like, yes I knew she was a bit stubborn, and annoying, but who isn’t. Betraying someone you have talked about multiple times as your best friend and then lying about it for years, however?
But I decided to put my worries aside for the moment and just be more careful around her before I actually formed an opinion. I also had never met Jane before so at that point it probably wouldn’t have been my place to intervene.
During my trip, I get the idea to plan a surprise party for Tony in the summer and I share it with Heather who seems on board and ready to help.
That aside, the rest of my visit was pretty uneventful up until my last day there.
It being my last day, I wanted to spend it with all my friends, so me, Tony, and Heather met up at a mall to hang out. After a while, I noticed Heather looking pretty down so I asked her if she was alright. She told me she was feeling a bit worried because she got the impression that Tony was growing more distant from her. She revealed to me that this actually already happened before, during Tony’s last relationship, and she was scared it was going to happen again. “And I’m so sorry for involving you like this but do you think you could talk to him for me?”
Now, you have to know Tony and her were never the best of friends; he’s always been closer to Jane than he was with her, simply because they don’t have many things in common. Heather also had the habit of constantly bringing up his ex in my presence, by making weird comparisons with me about literally anything. “Oh, you’re dyeing your hair red? Tony’s ex also dyed her hair red for a while. Omg your eyeliner is so good, you know Tony’s ex actually—”
No. I do, in fact, not know and I would like to keep it that way.
So when she mentioned his ex, being the idiot that I am, I felt so bad because I somehow assumed it was my fault, that I distracted him from his friends with my psychic evil girlfriend powers and therefore it was my responsibility to fix it.
So in May, I start planning Tony’s birthday party and Heather decided that for some reason it was her job to invite people and plan activities and literally plan the whole fucking party actually. She kept making suggestions I knew he would hate and inviting people he outright said he couldn’t stand, until I had enough and was forced to put my foot down. I let her invite her boyfriend and a friend of hers and handled the rest myself. In the meantime, I contacted Jane. Because unlike Heather, I know my boyfriend well enough to understand who his friends are so I always knew Jane was going to make the list, which I anticipated to Heather back in February. Her response was something along the lines of, “It’s okay for me if it’s okay for her”, which I thought was good enough. After all, I wasn’t expecting them to chat like nothing had happened but I assumed they would both be mature enough to put their differences aside for their friend’s sake.
The day of the party comes and Heather and I get there early to set things up, and when we’re in the bathroom doing our makeup she goes, “Hey, this might be a weird question but did Jane mention if she was bringing anyone?”.
This is where I might have been a bit of a bitch. Because Jane did actually ask me if she could bring her boyfriend, the same guy from the story that keeps coming back, and she even apologized for that, but knowing there were going to be three couples at the party already, including Heather and her own boyfriend, I didn’t even think twice before saying yes. However, I also failed to mention that to Heather until the day of the party.
When she found out, she was gone. Completely lost the plot, would not hear reason. She spent the whole evening sitting on the couch next to her boyfriend, with her back to the rest of the party, ignoring everyone else unless they asked her a question directly or forced her into conversation. After the umpteenth failed attempt of including her I felt so guilty I went to cry in the bathroom thinking I had ruined my boyfriend’s party because Heather was not having fun.
Days later, when all of this turned into a paragraph fight via text, instead of apologizing she kept attacking Tony for being rude to her and not understanding that she is very introverted and has “major anxiety”, and that was the reason why she didn’t even try to celebrate his birthday with him once throughout the night. Something I found hard to believe as I had been in that position before, while she was the one to help me out of it, introducing me to new people. So I am well aware of what it means to feel out of place, which is why I tried my best that night, and I also know that if she really wanted to do more, she would’ve.
During the fight, I finally had the opportunity to really talk to Jane for the first time and finding out about some things Heather did to her while they were friends reminded me of something else she did to me.

Back in November 2022, I got on birth control. Naturally I texted my friend, telling her about it.
Her response was, and I quote: “I have a theory. I’ve noticed a pattern where all of Tony’s girlfriends (ex and you) have started taking birth control since dating him soooo he either forced the girls or the girls don't care about STDs and accidental pregnancies. And the side effects obv.”
So I brought this back up during our fight. She tried to deny and to claim she was simply in “shock” because of my sudden interest in birth control, but I sent her back the proof of how she ignored everything I was trying to tell her only to keep trying to prove her hypotheses. My message said: “I was excited because I had done my research, I found a gyno and I went on my own and I texted you knowing that I couldn't share that excitement with my mother so I thought my friend would understand but instead you just came up with conspiracy theories about Tony forcing his girlfriends to get on BC or his girlfriends not caring about accidental pregnancies which was extremely insulting and I still don't know what your intention was because if you were joking it wasn't funny. I was being really vulnerable and you just basically chastised me. I can understand not agreeing but there's ways and ways to say that, you can still be happy and supportive while disagreeing, which was not what you did at all.”
She apologized but also said “I’m sorry you felt that way”. I decided to leave it at that and forget about it.
A couple of weeks later she angrily texted me wondering why I didn’t wish her a happy birthday.
So, AITA?

Surahs 40-46 begin with the disconnected letters "Ha Mim" the following verses in some of these surahs affirm the authoritative nature and authenticity of the Quran. These surahs contain other formulaic and thematic parallels (as per Islam Dayeh's paper on the intertextuality and coherence of Meccan surahs) According to that paper, they are interconnected and complement one another, the paper contains a thorough analysis of the surahs and provides compelling arguments for interconnectedness of the surahs and presents some evidence from exegesis as well. It also argues that the preceding surah, which begins with the second verse of Surah 40, is also interrelated with the Ḥawāmīm surahs but Surah 39 does not begin with the disconnected letters "Ha Mim", instead, it begins by affirming the authenticity of the Quran (same verse as 40:2). Despite the absence of the disconnected letters, Surah 39 fits the pattern of the Ḥawāmīm surahs and is placed right before them in chronological order and It shares similarities with the Ḥawāmīm surahs.
Why does Surah 39 not contain the disconnected letters? What led to their absence? The disconnected letters are (supposedly?) present in the Ubayy Mushaf, so why are they absent from the Quran, despite the surah being placed right before the Ḥawāmīm surahs in chronological order?

This study suggests that quite often the literary student of the Qurʾan has more to benefit from a critical and resourceful reading of the traditional exegetical literature than from much of modern Qurʾanic scholarship. The difference between the two approaches is the difference between the view that the text is a finely interconnected whole, as our quoted exegetes assumed, and the view that it is a patchwork of miscellaneous texts, as most contemporary scholars assume.

Also the study makes this comment, what does this sub make of it?

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^{2024-05-21T07:26:29Z}

Barron, Laird. “Vastation,” The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2013)
“He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realised in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.”
“There were “Carters” in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of earth’s history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility. “Carters” of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were “Carters” having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua.”
“No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.”
H. P. Lovecraft – “The Gates of the Silver Key”
Preface:
When I volunteered to do a write-up for our year-long Laird Barron reading, Greg casually mentioned –slyly, one might say– that he had been planning to cover “Vastation” and would I like a crack at it instead? “Sure,” I said. “I like a challenge, why not?” My wife has left me. No one comes to visit me in this place where I have been taken. Even the rats and fleas, so ubiquitous in the rest of the institution, give my cell a wide berth. They know something is wrong. My thoughts spiral; I write in circles. It is possible that in a previous life I was a detective attempting to construct a timeline from a serial killer’s wall of thumbtacks and string. I will have my revenge on Greg.
Another Preface:
“Vastation” is actually a very straightforward story. You only need to familiarize yourself with the works of H. P. Lovecraft, read a little weird fiction literary theory, and stumble across an old interview between Laird and Greg. “Vastation” is what you get when you bludgeon Lovecraft’s stories over the head and throw their remains down a deep well into the Laird Barron cosmos. To crudely rearrange a few of Laird’s thoughts from the above-mentioned interview:
“Time is a ring… the universe is dirty… it’s all about stomach acids and semen and blood and effluvia… there’s even theories that it’s a cellular structure. [I]f you can get to the edge of the universe… If you were able to travel in your physical form, like superman, out to not the edge of the universe but the edge of all creation… you would cease to exist because there’s no room for you to exist there.”1
You drop Randolph Carter’s, “moment of consuming fright,” his epiphany at the end of everything that he is all living things, into Laird’s vision of an unending, hungering, ouroboros of time and space, and we have the premise of “Vastation.”
Two more points.

1. In reading many, but not all, of Lovecraft’s stories alluded to in, “Vastation,” I have learned that old Howie loved to write about characters living through the ages, living multiple lives, and taking numerous identities. The most prominent after, “The Gates of the Silver Key,” would be “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” Attention should also be paid to “The Whisperer in Darkness,” because it is the first appearance of the Mi-Go, who I believe to be the inspiration for Laird’s Pod People. 

2. The author and critic John Clute wrote a wonderful piece on the concept of vastation in regards to literary horror. He defines it, in part, as, “… a laying waste to a land or a psyche; a physical or psychological devastation; desolation… the even more disintegrative moment when the accidents of goodness are shaved mercilessly from the unsalvageable central core of the wicked.” In other words, vastation is when the illusory fabric of reality is pulled out from under the feet of the protagonist or narrator, exposing the absolute horrors beneath. In most horror or weird fiction stories vastation occurs gradually throughout the text or once at the climax. In “Vastation,” it happens endlessly. 

Summary and analysis:
“Vastation” is, as Laird once put it, “a “6000-word monologue from an unutterably mad superhuman” (UMS). Like Randolph Carter, he—and UMS does think of him/itself as a he, more on that later—knows that in some impossible sense he is all people, all living beings, throughout all of creation. He lives countless lives. He knows the future and the past, albeit imperfectly. He knows how to jump his consciousness from one body to another, how to travel time, how to manipulate biology on a molecular level. His knowledge and powers and nearly godlike. In death, in sleep, or simply by staring into his own left “freakish eyeball,” he visits the infernal blackhole known as Ur-Nyctos, the “the quaking mass at the center of everything,” and “portal to the blackest of hells.” There, he shatters into quantum nothingness before reconstituting somewhere else along the ring, and he knows it will never stop. World without end, lives without end, vastations without end.
Things get darker. Completely insane, UMS spends eternity killing himself, killing his friends, getting killed by his friends, and participating in the occasional apocalypse, all the while somewhat aware he is everyone he has ever killed and everyone who will ever kill him. Every turn of the ring is the same story from a different angle, like UMS riding a train at night, looking at his reflection in the dark window.
“Vastation” begins with the answer to an impossible question. Where does the story of someone unshackled from cause and effect, imprisoned in an eternally looping cosmos, start? How did UMS become the unutterably mad superhuman? Laird throws so many red herrings at us. Does the story begin in Chicago, when UMS dies at the hands of his personal Judas, Pontius Sacrus? Or in Crete, when he claims to have been a mere flea, or human, and beholds Ur-Nyctos through the keyhole in the potter’s hidden room (shout out to “Jaws of Saturn”)? Or when he abandons his distant-future body to be taken over by the Pod People? None of these moments contain UMS’s origin because they have happened before and will happen again ad infinitum. In “Vastation,” there are no first times. Laird solves this paradox by burying a plot point from “The Gates of the Silver Key” in the first words of “Vastation.”
“When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth; I was the only human being on the planet.” Notice, UMS did not say, “when I was six years old.” I spent weeks wondering what that meant. Then I noticed that Laird twice calls time traveling “tripping back.” It seemed oddly specific and turned out to be a phrase from “The Gates of the Silver Key,” in which, after Randolph Carter experiences the Zen-through-cosmic-horror epiphany I quoted at the top of this write-up, he beseeches Yog-Sothoth—because of course Yog-Sothoth makes an appearance— for even greater forbidden knowledge. Yog-Sothoth tells Carter, “what you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet—five times only to those you call men, or those resembling them.”
Five men, making Carter the sixth human, or sixth being resembling a human. “When I was six, I discovered…” The previous five are Pontiff Sacrus and UMS’s other friends.
About Pontiff Sacrus, I also spent an embarrassing amount of time obsessing over him. It may be of interest to know that high priests of ancient Rome were known as the College of Pontiffs, that the most prestigious position in the college was held by the Rex Sacrorum, that Ted is short for Edward, and that Edward Hutchinson is a necromancer who lives many lives and a significant character in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”
By the way, the other time Laird stamps his foot and stares pointedly at the reader is when he employs the term “essential saltes.” It’s from “Charles Dexter Ward,” which begins with the following quote:
“The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.”
So, UMS is damned to eternal life and eternal vastation. He, understandably, is insane. He whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Denials, contradictions, and possibly flat-out lies fill his monologue. Again, it’s in the first sentence. “I was the only human being on the planet.” He has to tell himself this. The knowledge of what he always will be, what he always has done, what he always will do., is too terrible for him to bear. He denies his infinite identities with the solipsist problem of other minds. He cannot be other people because other people are fungible, mere cheap Xerox’s, fleas; he is the only real McCoy. This is especially true of women—I said we would return to gender. While humanity in general is “grist for the mill,” women are either mentioned in passing or, in the case of UMS’s wives, described as inhuman automatons.
Think about it. Even though, on an infinite loop, he has done everything, been every human, has been/will be Beyoncé releasing her country album, Joan of Arc leading her men into battle, Martha Stewart receiving her sentence, and Bathory forcing some girl—who is also him—to kick stars, UMS never describes a single life he has spent as a woman. I think this is UMS grasping at an identity. It’s not that he necessarily hates women more than any other aspect of his universal selves so much as he is clinging to his gender as a self-defense mechanism. He is an individual because he flirts with Macedonian honeys. He is himself and not the wives he is tired of fucking, who are artificial anyway, even as they react to him with the very human responses of fear and suicide.2
Returning to the big picture, UMS’s cosmic gender identity issues are just the micro in the macro. Every timeline, every epoch, in “Vastation” is a story of committing murder to avoid forbidden knowledge. UMS’s wife kills herself rather than spend another night next to him as he dreams of Ur-Nyctos. UMS kills the potter before he can finish explaining how his wheel-device works—get it? — and then kills iteration after iteration of himself before he discovers the bloody peephole in the potter’s hidden chamber. He’s accused of witchcraft and imprisoned in a different well where he cannot share his knowledge of the past or future with anyone except other aspects of himself who mock him from the mouth of his prison. He reveals nanotech and genetic engendering to humanity, then commits global genocide to erase this knowledge. Again and again, UMS tries to keep humanity and himself from forbidden knowledge he cannot escape, murderously, scrambling back from the edges of vastation, forever failing.
There’s so much more. Any person who doesn’t miss the days when he went to sleep at a reasonable hour could write a dissertation on “Vastation.” I haven’t even TOUCHED most of the Lovecraft Easter eggs I found. I had a blast working on this, but this is me holding my gloves up and yelling, “no mas, no mass.” I’m going to bed.
Discussion:

1. Gordon van Gelder famously told Laird that he had bought “Shiva, Open Your Eye” (Laird’s first professional sale) because he wanted to see what Laird would do next. Ten years later, Vastation saw publication in Cthulhu’s Reign and has been called something of a reincarnation of “Shiva.” What similarities do we see? 

   1. I suspect, but could not find enough support in the texts, that UMS’s ascendancy into superhuman status, or his visits to Ur-Nyctos—if there is a difference—is what awakens the Old Ones, drawing their attention to pitiful humanity. He does seem to do his best to avoid them. Thoughts?
   2. If anyone has any thoughts about what Laird was referencing when UMS pushes his best friend off a bridge I would love to hear it.
   3. Does Laird deny UMS a name because he is everyone?
   4. “After I made me, I crushed the mold under my heel.” That’s some sort of pun about the fungal Pod People, right?
   Footnotes / references
   
2. from an interview between Greg and Laird which took place on June 23, 2021.
   “There was one theory, if you can get to the edge of the universe, somehow get to the leading, bleeding edge of reality, it’s actually, it would compress you to, basically it would get narrower and narrower. You would get flattened. If you were able to travel in your physical form, like superman, out to not the edge of the universe but the edge of all creation, it acts just like a blade… you would cease to exist because there’s no room for you to exist there.
   And that was one theory. But the other theory was--you know how a fountain works? You’ve got a base of water and it shoots up, and it looks like a different stream of water coming out of the angel’s mouth, but it’s just the water cycling. It’s the same water going through. That was another theory about the universe. It is constantly going through itself. If you recycle the water through the fountain, or you pull a slinky through itself, or a sock, it just constantly turns into itself over and over again.
   …maybe it’s not always 100% the same, because the slinky moves left or right a few millimeters. Unless you have it on a machine going through the same exact angle at the same speed, possibly there’s: this time it went through like this; maybe it wobbled a little bit. That’s how we could get the idea of free will. That determinism vs. you can have a little control over your destiny…
   Time is a ring… the universe is dirty. Look at the processes of all--there could be life forms out there that are very clean and just made of light and music…[b]ut generally speaking, it’s all about stomach acids and semen and blood and effluvia and all this stuff. So I was like alright, it’s an organic--the universe is very organic. There’s even theories that it’s a cellular structure.”
   
   1. Anyone interested in this type of analysis might want to check out Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject.

...this conniving hyper-intelligent evil mofo would most certainly have built nearly impenetrable steel/iron gates and works ALL AROUND Mt Doom, certainly and especially at the entrance leading into the lava chamber. Remember what Gandalf said of Sauron:
"Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning."
Now, you may think with that quote I'm undoing my own argument here... but read that once more. In a sense, it is a contradictory statement of sorts. On one hand, he is so wise he "weighs ALL things to a nicety", but then on the other hand he lusts after power so greatly he can't imagine others NOT doing the same... but at the cost of a glaring blind spot. So which is it? Well, clearly in the books he doesn't fortify Mt Doom all that heavily, there is a weak point, the fellowship finds it and exploits it, then Gollum pulls the last trigger to seal the deal on Sauron's downfall, and there you have it. There's your literary answer and I'm a fool to contest it, you say...
However, that still doesn't fully satisfy the quandary there, and leaves that blind spot still open to scrutiny as to what he reasonably and by all rights should and would have done, when fully considering his character more fully than just the typical rejoinder of "Well, he didn't THINK anyone could ever do that, so he just didn't bother." Really though? After all, he fortified and thought to strengthen literally everything else around him, why not add a touch more love to fortify Mt Doom? What would it hurt, to be safe than sorry? As though that single thought and weakness had NEVER crossed his mind in 1000s of years constantly sitting around thinking about everything under the sun related to his own power and plans of conquest (and his weak points), down to every last detail? Even after having literally been defeated in the 2nd age in the battle of the Last Alliance and nearly had the One tossed into Mt Doom once already, and thus barely missed complete destruction by a hair the last time around?
I know how Tolkien wrote it, but same as with the "why didn't the eagles just fly the ring straight there?" logical challenge, in a similar vein I don't quite buy it (the answer to it, that is). Yes, questioning this even while simultaneously having infinite respect for the man and the story, naturally.
Let's return to Sauron, then...
This is a Maiar who is as old as Arda, by this point EONS old. Arda is debatably anywhere between 30,000-50,000 solar years old by the end of the 3rd age. So, the guy is older than time itself, the word ancient hardly scratches the surface, and he has been evil and plotting the majority of all that time, since Morgoth corrupted him shortly after arriving on Arda. And in that time, Mairon-Annatar-Sauron has seen or heard or studied literally ALL of the battles between the Valar, elves, men and Morgoth, going back to the very beginning. He was there for all of it. He helped designed and build numerous fortresses and keeps and works for his old boss and in his own reign, going back many millennia. He has personally witnessed and fought in countless battles, and seen the mighty laid low by the weak and seemingly helpless. He understands what a "critical flaw" is, what we would call in Earth mythology an "Achilles Heel". This concept is not foreign to him. And again, he is one of the most cunning strategists and most capable smiths in Arda, second only to Aulë. He crafted the One over decades of labor in his secret forge at Mt Doom, intimately and always aware that Mt Doom's lava is the only thing that could destroy it. Remember also, like Morgoth, Sauron knew FEAR, and was secretly afraid of many things... afraid of the Valar, afraid of elves and men allying themselves against him once more, even a little bit afraid of Aragorn, certainly afraid of "death" or at least the version of death that Morgoth before him had suffered to be cast out through the Door of Night back into the Void beyond. Fear becomes paranoia especially in an evil selfish mind, and paranoia can make you think of CRAZY SHIT. Even crazy shit that might seem unimaginable. And someone trying to destroy the ring is hardly unimaginable to him.
But you're telling me this same Sauron simply... "forgot" (or) "didn't think"... to build as simple of a preventative measure as gates and works surrounding all entrances to Mt Doom?
Also keep in mind, just because Gandalf and his allies didnt THINK that Sauron would ever suspect anyone of trying to destroy something so powerful and amazing and quickly corrupting as the One, doesn't necessarily MEAN that Sauron didn't ever think of that. Just means that was the fellowship's best educated guess at the time according to their own mind-theory of the grand chess board of the world and their great adversary's likely moves, that's all.
You can cite all the typical "He didn't think anyone would dooooo that!" type arguments. Still, I just don't buy it. I think realistically, being the character he was, he totally and absolutely would have. A mind like his might not even have thought of it for... 1,875 years! That's a LONG ass time not thinking of some vital shit as important and glaring as that. I will even posit that much. Guy was busy, after all. Lot's of minions to bully about. But then guess what... he's still Sauron. He thinks of the little things, eventually. So, after 1875 years having NOT thought of it (I'll give you that much), he then inevitably wakes up one day out of bed on the very next year of 1876, and as he's looking into his Palantir he has a random thought, and on that morning he thinks to himself:
"You know what... I STILL don't have the One ring yet. And that giant volcano is wide open, if someone were to infiltrate my realm somehow. Sure, nobody would want to destroy it, and sure they'd never even be able to get within 100 miles of it. But then again, the One is still out there and... there are those DAMNED eagles, Manwe's personal pets. Fuckin' Valar, hate those cocky bastards. You know what, it won't ever happen, BUT, I'm Sauron, I'm wise and crafty and weigh all things to a nicety in my secret lair of endless plotting, sooooo let me knock out this one worry right NOW, while I'm still chillin in Mordor and the whole world is still asleep, and put up some beefy-ass gates 'n works to plug up Mt Doom. That way IF anybody were to roll up in here with the One and try to destroy it again, they'd at least have to get through some black-gate quality walls of steel to do so first! Alright, let me assign the 45th construction regiment on that, stat. I will sleep easier for the next 2000 years knowing that hole is plugged...."
The point is there, that he WOULD have thought of it at some point. He exists in his tower of Barad-Dur constantly staring down at that volcano every single day. Of course he would have thought of it. Even as a random ridiculous passing thought, in all those millennia chillin there (and around). Inevitably so.
________________________________________________________
Now, having said all that, unlike the "why didn't the eagles just fly the ring straight there?" challenge, I don't think Mt Doom being gated up and practically impenetrable would have ended or even changed the story. Frodo and Sam could still have arrived there and by some small crevice or gap that maybe inadvertently Gollum showed them the way through (small rewrite to pen that in as such) or whatever other way, they still found their way in and the story ended the same way.
In fact, even if there were massive gates barring the last little few feet of the way, blocking the hobbits after that whole arduous journey... so what? An eagle lands dropping Gandalf there at the tightly shut door to Mt Doom (he possessed the other remaining Palantir, mind you, he could have seen the hobbits arrived there and then called an eagle to meet htem), the flying Ringwraiths and eagles battle it out in a badass aerial dogfight and Gandalf the White (his more powerful 2nd incarnation) nearly dies using all of his Maia energy to create a tiny crack in the iron doors (Narya even shatters at the effort, let's say), and... big deal, hobbits still get in, Gollum still bites Frodo's finger and falls in.
So, I'm not arguing against the story playing out the same way it did or saying it was implausible. Many ways to easily work around the "there would have been a gate there" logical challenge.
All I'm saying is, perhaps for no other greater point than to try to make the point... he WOULD have built gates and works around Mt Doom to defend it better (and yes, obviously kept them shut pretty much always, with him alone having the key). 100%. Leaving such a critical vulnerability as glaring as that wide open because "he didn't think anyone would do that" just doesn't add up. It's just not Sauron. Yes the books say he didn't think of it, but I just don't buy Sauron would leave it wide open for anyone to waltz in. Makes no sense. People tried to destroy the One before and he knew they did. Sauron was also aware that the elves and wizards knew how to destroy it, even going back to Celebrimbor's days. So that is just not a convincing argument. Personally, I think it's a convenient oversight Tolkien thought about but maybe left in there anyway because it made it easy for the whole Frodo-Gollum confusion coup de grâce final climax to happen without anyone else needing to be there or other obstacles in the way, and because it also jived well with the whole "this is how we're going to plausibly destroy the Ring" story arc. But NOT because it actually made sense with who Sauron really was.
I also say all this with tremendous respect to JRRT, because... there ain't many of these kinds of gaps/plot holes in the entire legendarium, you REALLY have to dig for them! That says tons.

First Off: SPOILERS FOR THE STORY!
Even if it was not perfect, I highly recommend "A Study in Scarlet!" It's fascinating to see Sherlock Holmes' first literary adventure. Not only to compare and contrast it with how the character and its interpretations have evolved over the years, but to witness the craft and skill of Arthur Conan Doyle in crafting a gripping Victorian yarn (at about the tenth the size of the usual length of a serialized story of that period)
You've been warned!
"Study in Scarlet" is many things, but it certainly is no boring.
I had spent many years of my young life being exposed to many differing interpretation of iconoclastic consulting detective, and have loved almost every single one of them. But, in spite of there (usually) good quality, these were merely "echoes" of the actual thing.
As such, earlier this year, me and several friends of mine formed a sort of book club, intent on finally reading this famed novel. We would go about it a chapter every two days and hopefully finish it in about a month.
Well, life being what it is, delays in readings accrued. For some, it was a missed chapter on a particular day (guilty as charged).
For others, well, they're still reading it.
Which brings me to this review. Two months back I had finally finished my copy of the novel, a beautifully researched and annotated printed under the "Oxford World Classics" label. I would heartily recommend this version, as it helped clarify some of the misconceptions put forth by the book in its second half, shedding a light on some of Arthur Conan Doyle's politics in the process.
More on that later.
For now, let's get on with the show.
It's 1881 in Victorian Era England. John Watson, a 2nd Afghanistan War Doctor has been discarged back to his home country following injury. Quickly running out of money from the meager army pension he makes, he meets up with an old hospital colleague who introduces him to the titular Sherlock Holmes.
This introduction was utterly fascinating, portraying a Sherlock who is utterly giddy and quirky in a way that I've never seen him as in any other adaption. It immediately sheds a light on his eccentric nature, and I would be remissed if I didn't mention how it seems to feel reminiscent of those on the spectrum. I almost lament that this aspect of his character is largley absent in most adaptions. It's quite endearing.
Following this meet-up, Sherlock and Watson get on quite well. Enough so that they decide to purchase an apartment and become roommates on, you guessed it, 221b Baker Street.
(An address that doesn't actually exist, as my annotated copy pointed out. Shame.)
It is at this point, Watson notes, that he realizes just how eccentric Holmes really is.
We have the usual expected details, the ones adaptions tend to carry over. Is reading of police reports and "sensational literature," his immense knowledge of poisons and murder methods, and even a violin he strums to calm himself. Then there are the more... obscure aspects. Thankfully, Watson made a sort of list that can help. His uncommon knowledge of all things crime seems to have usurped the place of layman's knowledge in his "Mind palace." His awareness of politics is little, and his knowledge of normal literature, philosophy, and astrology is "nil," to quote Watson.
He doesn't even know that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Sherlock Holmes. Master detective. Doesn't know that the Earth revolves around the damn Sun.
Utterly, hilarious.
Anyways, after some rumination on the science of deduction, we are thrust into the story either an incoming telegram from Inspector Lestrade. Since Sherlock's occupation is being a consulting detective, he offers aid to the stumped police for a small fee. A man has been found dead from a supposed suicide in an abandoned building, with only a bloody word written above a mantelpiece as any indication of motivation.
"RACHE"
However, rather than focusing on the crime itself, Sherlock focuses on the surrounding area, poking around and astutely Study every single little detail he comes across with utter focus. After an extended amount of time does he actually arrive at the main crime scene to study, and the bloody message. The police, of course, assume it's a name: "Rachel." However, Sherlock (in his boundless intelligence) surmises that it is actually the German word "Revenge." Not only that, but he figures out there was another man, working out his height, walk, and dress.
This isn't a suicide. It's murder.
The investigation continues, another murder occurs, a suprisingly exciting chase scene happens, and finally Sherlock lures the murderer right into the heart of 221b Baker Street.
Enter "The Killer Mormons."
It's at this point that the story takes an unexpected left turn, as we suddenly flash back 34 years ago in America, and a community of Mormons in Salt Lake City.
Look, before we proceed, I should clarify that I am not Mormon. At best, my exposure to Mormon culture was stumbling across a Mormon museum out in Albany, NY and that one South Park Episode.
All of that is to say that I don't know too much about the culture, so I was appreciative that my book helped clarify some misconceptions and biased viewings that Doyle sadly indulged in here. For what little Doyle got right, he got a lot wrong, with a lot of it seemingly being the result of fear mongering and disgust. It's kind of uncomfortable, seeing Doyle villianize an actual religion and community and portraying them as a murderous cult with a secret hit squad essentially.
It's weird, and it definitely sheds a light on why I've never seen a straight adaption of this story.
Still, we get a fascinating tragic love story. The murderer was an American cowboy simply avenging his dearly beloved, a young girl adopted by the Mormon community along with her own adoptive dad. She and her father intended to leave the community, but the Motmon Elder was having none of it, intending to marry her off to another Mormon member. After the girl and her father were murdered by the earlier murder victims of this story in retaliation, the cowboy set off on a trail of vengeance that would stretch on for decades, until the stars finally aligned for him to go in for the kills. And once he explains his side of the story to Holmes and the police, he dies of an aneurysm.
The next day, the papers credit the police for cracking the case, leaving Watson determined to set the record straight much to Holmes' bemusement.
And with that, our mystery comes to an end.
I walked away from the story feeling bowled over by the sheer scope of it all. What started off as a classic Holmes mystery, evolved into a western epic full of love, betrayal, death and... Killer Mormons.
It should probably be a testament to Doyle's immense skill as a storyteller that the deeply flawed second section was as compelling as it was. It's flawed view of Mormon culture definitely didn't help it, and one wonders if it were replaced with a generic commune/cult, it would have been the better for it. It certainly was interesting regardless, but perhaps my own love of western movies helped.
It was great to finally see Sherlock's "science of deduction" methodology in play, and it's as amazing as I've heard.
I also came away from the novel better appreciating what Doyle brought to the detective genre, and even Sherlock as a whole!
To those who have seen media based on Sherlock, and loved it, I implore you to check out the novels. At least then I'll have someone to talk about this crazy book with, heh.
Can't wait to read "The Sign of Four" next!

I just had the best birth experience of my life. This is my second child. Just for a backstory, I had my first child unassisted in the front seat of the car on the way to the hospital. So I was already aware of what an unassisted birth was like, and thankfully, everything was perfect and healthy with my first son. Unfortunately, I did not have a good experience with the hospitals last time or this time around. The labor and delivery departments that I have been to have treated me so terribly. I wanted to have a home birth with my first, but my care team at my doctors office bullied me out of it. Then my son was born in the car so I wished I had gotten my homebirth. Fast forward to this Thursday, I had the most amazing unassisted home birth anybody could ever ask for. It went exactly according to plan. I didn't let anybody bully me this pregnancy and I decided that I didn't want any medical “professionals” involved. I only put that in quotes because the ones I have been dealing with were absolutely not professional. My partner was fully supportive of me in this choice my entire pregnancy. We went over the plan hundreds of times and did so much research on what to do/supplies to have on hand in case anything went wrong. I bought a birthing pool and everything we needed, got the stuff to encapsulate the placenta, etc. My water broke at 6 AM and baby boy #2 was born at 3:45 PM in the birthing pool. It was perfect. He was born at 36+1. The pain was unimaginable, but the experience is one I will treasure for a lifetime. I am so proud of myself for trusting my body. This was my last pregnancy, so I'm just so relieved to have gotten the perfect birth that I wanted with only my family there to witness and be involved. I just wanted to share my experience. I understand not everyone agrees with home births or unassisted births and not everyone had a positive experience like me, but that is my story.

“This book is on voyages to the North, where Lord Debling intends to travel.”
“Miss Featherington, are you reading about the fabled Northwest Passage?”
(S3 E4 11:16)
Hi everyone! I posted a comment about it right after season 3 dropped, and I have seen a bit of interest in the Northwest Passage on here recently. I thought that for those of you who didn’t learn about it extensively in school in the small corner of Canada that I did, I’d put together a little informative post on the extremely brief (and perhaps even inconsequential!) reference to the Northwest Passage in Episode 4. I’ll provide an overview of the Passage and its history, touch on some characteristics of travel to this region, and conclude with some completely speculative comments on the literary purpose of evoking the passage in this scene in Season 4.
Also, full credit to the other NWP enthusiasts who have been making posts about this and discussing it in other threads.
A quick note on the colonial nature of this post: Throughout this short post, I refer to several colonial expeditions to the land many of us call Canada. Although I attempt to be cognizant of my language, it is important to note that the Inuit people who live in the arctic regions that I reference have navigated the sea ice for thousands of years (Panikkar et al., 2018) and that the written history of this region are often hegemonic and euro-centric narratives that were formed within colonial frameworks.
More information on the Inuit and their culture, language, and traditions can be found here: https://www.itk.ca/about-canadian-inuit/
References are at the end. If you like this post, you might also like the speculative post I made about the influences of the Eros/Psyche quote in the which is also endless academic yapping.
Exploring the Northwest Passage- a bit of context
In August of 1820, Lieutenant Edward Parry, a member of the British Royal Navy observed the dense ice and snow of arctic land and sea that was thought to be the location of the mysterious Northwest Passage. From a simple look, he knew that no ship in existence would be able to pass through ice sheets of such a great thickness and that extended for such a long distance (Brandt, 2011). Despite his pessimism, by Parry’s time, British sailors and explorers had been explicitly seeking the passage for hundreds of years (Williams & Costley, 2010; Day, 2006, p. xxiv), dreaming of exploiting the desirable economic prospect of a Western route from Europe to burgeoning Asian markets.
First encounters: When European sailors first encountered North America, it was in pursuit of a route west to Asia. They were, of course, incorrect about the location of Asia. And although a great deal of interest shifted to mapping the new continent, there was also an acknowledgement that there would be great economic benefits to finding a way around this newly encountered landmass (Day, 2006). Over time, the reasons and methods of locating the Northwest Passage changed and evolved, but interest never truly went away.
Renewed British interest: Notably, at the end of the 15^th century, when the Ottoman Turk’s empire extended into the Mediterranean and eastward, European merchants were no longer allowed to move and trade freely (Day, 2006). Seeking new routes for the Pacific, European (and especially British) explorers turned West. The Northwest Passage was a concept, a theoretical possibility, for European explorers. It was seen as a potential commercial sea route to the trading markets that were already established and burgeoning in Asia. The Passage was a route with phenomenal economic potential, especially as European consumers sought spices, materials, salts, and woods from foreign markets (Williams & Costley, 2010).
Based on their knowledge of the Southern Hemisphere and the potential geography of the world, many believed that a similar passage would be reflected in the earth’s northern pole (Day, 2006). As a result, there was a massive potential for financial gain for colonial governments and individuals, should such a passage ever be found.
Public fascination: The passage became a point of national fascination for many members of the public. In pursuit of this fascination, many enthusiastic researchers “persuaded persons of influence and wealth to send out discovery expeditions” (Williams & Costley, 2010, p. xv). With governments in Europe stabilizing, the emergence of an economy of cheap labour (lower class men who were willing to take on the dangerous work at sea), and the rapid development of ship technology, the 1600s was a prime time to set out on expeditions.
The fascination with the Passage continued for 300 years until a passage was finally navigated by sea in full in the 1900s. Over the course of history, Anthony Brandt describes the fascination with the Passage’s discovery as a tragedy (2011). He writes: “hubris, an all-too-human arrogance and pride that triggered a particular calamity” (p. 5) as being the tragedy of the exploration for the Passage. Despite the fascination of the public with it, the ice “remained intractable, impenetrable, and, for those who challenged it, a kind of fate” (p. 5) George Malcom Thomson reported that the Passage did not exist where popular imagination speculated it must be (Day, 2006). He noted: “the whole enterprise was founded on a misapprehension, a geographical fiction, a fairy-tale … and downright inventions that scholar manufacture to amaze themselves” (p. xxv).
The danger of the passage: Voyages to and in search of the passage were fraught. Many never returned, and those who did survive faced immense physical and mental challenges. There were, of course, significant difficulties with massive ice drifts and shelves. However, the relative location of the expeditions to the north pole led to issues with magnetic variation for compasses. Fog further complicated travel (Williams & Costley, 2010).
There were also extreme mental dangers to pursuing the NWP. MooSmith’s expedition in the mid-1700s reported “potentially murderous quarrels between officers” (Williams & Costley, 2010, p. xvi); John Franklin noted that the things that occurred on his ship “must not be known” (p. xvi); and it was noted that on the McClure, Beckler, and Collinson expeditions, “tensions” erupted “as captains and subordinate officers exchanged threats of court martial, and some officers spend years under close arrest on their ships” (p. xvi).
In the time of Bridgerton: The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 allowed for greater expeditions by the British Royal Navy (Day, 2006). This would have included surveys of a large portion of the global north and the Arctic. There were a large number of “successful” (depending on how you define it) land expeditions that had made progress in producing surveys and maps of the region. Despite significant ongoing interest in discovering the Passage, in particular, little progress had been made. Later still, despite more advanced mapping by the Hudson Bay Company and expeditions by many notable sailors, there was still no route by the 1820s (Day, 2006).
What does it signify? If a character in Bridgerton was voyaging to the Arctic, it could take them less than a year to reach areas of the Hudson Bay that would be suitable for a scientific voyage. That in itself is not overly dangerous. However, the reference to the Northwest Passage is an interesting literary point. Of all of the places to voyage in the Arctic, even at the time, it would have been an immensely dangerous trip to set out on. The persistent lack of success for a solid 30 years after this season takes place may reference the fact that this is a voyage that Debling is unlikely to ever return from.
It doesn’t help that Debling’s odds are really stacked against him. He does not eat meat, one of the only renewable sources of food for arctic expeditions. There is little to no fresh naturally occurring produce (during the Coppermine expedition, the surviving crew members famously ate lichen to survive once they lost the favour of local indigenous groups and fur traders) and did not do well.
Certainly, it lends a very tragic potential element to the story. The Arctic, if mentioned alone, is not necessarily an overly dangerous location to travel to. Yes, marine travel in the 1800s was still a dangerous endeavour in its own right, let alone in an area as unnavigable by sea as the Arctic. However, the North, in many regions, had active whaling expeditions, Indigenous populations that were willing to trade and work with sailors, and (in some areas) active fur trades. If the purpose of Debling’s travel was only to highlight his unique interests and sense of purpose, the show had many methods of doing so. The choice to reference a notorious and dangerous Northwest Passage, there is an extremely interesting element of danger that is introduced.
What would this potential marriage mean for Penelope? Of course, Penelope’s name is a reference to the wife of Odysseus, who unwillingly takes ten years to return home after the Trojan war. In contrast to Colin, who returns with a steadfast conviction, Debling may represent a kind of eternal limbo for Penelope, should she marry him. Although Debling’s trip is set to take 3 years, it would be hard to prove his death. Likely, she would be a widow for years, if not her entire life, before they were able to locate his ship. The HMS Terror was famously lost in 1845 and not located until 2016(!). As a result, Penelope would likely be stuck at home, awaiting his return, in the same tragic fashion of her namesake in Greek mythology.
As such, not only is there a potential tragic reference to Debling’s future, but there is also a dark illusion to what Penelope’s life may look like as his wife. Of course, this is all based entirely on implication, but it is an interesting act of speculative foreshadowing.
Thanks for reading!
References
Brandt, A. (2011). The man who ate his boots: the tragic history of the search for the northwest passage. Anchor.
Day, A. (2006). Historical dictionary of the discovery and exploration of the Northwest Passage (Vol. 3). Scarecrow Press.
Panikkar, B., Lemmond, B., Else, B., & Murray, M. (2018). Ice over troubled waters: Navigating the Northwest Passage using Inuit knowledge and scientific information. Climate Research, 75(1), 81-94.
Williams, G., & Costley, S. (2010). Arctic labyrinth: The quest for the Northwest Passage. University of California Press.

“This book is on voyages to the North, where Lord Debling intends to travel.”
“Miss Featherington, are you reading about the fabled Northwest Passage?”
(S3 E4 11:16)
Hi everyone! I posted a comment about it right after season 3 dropped, and I have seen a bit of interest in the Northwest Passage on here recently. I thought that for those of you who didn’t learn about it extensively in school in the small corner of Canada that I did, I’d put together a little informative post on the extremely brief (and perhaps even inconsequential!) reference to the Northwest Passage in Episode 4. I’ll provide an overview of the Passage and its history, touch on some characteristics of travel to this region, and conclude with some completely speculative comments on the literary purpose of evoking the passage in this scene in Season 4.
A quick note on the colonial nature of this post: Throughout this short post, I refer to several colonial expeditions to the land many of us call Canada. Although I attempt to be cognizant of my language, it is important to note that the Inuit people who live in the arctic regions that I reference have navigated the sea ice for thousands of years (Panikkar et al., 2018) and that the written history of this region are often hegemonic and euro-centric narratives that were formed within colonial frameworks.
More information on the Inuit and their culture, language, and traditions can be found here: https://www.itk.ca/about-canadian-inuit/
References are at the end. If you like this post, you might also like the speculative post I made about the influences of the Eros/Psyche quote in the Polin sub which is also endless academic yapping.
Exploring the Northwest Passage- a bit of context
In August of 1820, Lieutenant Edward Parry, a member of the British Royal Navy observed the dense ice and snow of arctic land and sea that was thought to be the location of the mysterious Northwest Passage. From a simple look, he knew that no ship in existence would be able to pass through ice sheets of such a great thickness and that extended for such a long distance (Brandt, 2011). Despite his pessimism, by Parry’s time, British sailors and explorers had been explicitly seeking the passage for hundreds of years (Williams & Costley, 2010; Day, 2006, p. xxiv), dreaming of exploiting the desirable economic prospect of a Western route from Europe to burgeoning Asian markets.
First encounters: When European sailors first encountered North America, it was in pursuit of a route west to Asia. They were, of course, incorrect about the location of Asia. And although a great deal of interest shifted to mapping the new continent, there was also an acknowledgement that there would be great economic benefits to finding a way around this newly encountered landmass (Day, 2006). Over time, the reasons and methods of locating the Northwest Passage changed and evolved, but interest never truly went away.
Renewed British interest: Notably, at the end of the 15^th century, when the Ottoman Turk’s empire extended into the Mediterranean and eastward, European merchants were no longer allowed to move and trade freely (Day, 2006). Seeking new routes for the Pacific, European (and especially British) explorers turned West. The Northwest Passage was a concept, a theoretical possibility, for European explorers. It was seen as a potential commercial sea route to the trading markets that were already established and burgeoning in Asia. The Passage was a route with phenomenal economic potential, especially as European consumers sought spices, materials, salts, and woods from foreign markets (Williams & Costley, 2010).
Based on their knowledge of the Southern Hemisphere and the potential geography of the world, many believed that a similar passage would be reflected in the earth’s northern pole (Day, 2006). As a result, there was a massive potential for financial gain for colonial governments and individuals, should such a passage ever be found.
Public fascination: The passage became a point of national fascination for many members of the public. In pursuit of this fascination, many enthusiastic researchers “persuaded persons of influence and wealth to send out discovery expeditions” (Williams & Costley, 2010, p. xv). With governments in Europe stabilizing, the emergence of an economy of cheap labour (lower class men who were willing to take on the dangerous work at sea), and the rapid development of ship technology, the 1600s was a prime time to set out on expeditions.
The fascination with the Passage continued for 300 years until a passage was finally navigated by sea in full in the 1900s. Over the course of history, Anthony Brandt describes the fascination with the Passage’s discovery as a tragedy (2011). He writes: “hubris, an all-too-human arrogance and pride that triggered a particular calamity” (p. 5) as being the tragedy of the exploration for the Passage. Despite the fascination of the public with it, the ice “remained intractable, impenetrable, and, for those who challenged it, a kind of fate” (p. 5) George Malcom Thomson reported that the Passage did not exist where popular imagination speculated it must be (Day, 2006). He noted: “the whole enterprise was founded on a misapprehension, a geographical fiction, a fairy-tale … and downright inventions that scholar manufacture to amaze themselves” (p. xxv).
The danger of the passage: Voyages to and in search of the passage were fraught. Many never returned, and those who did survive faced immense physical and mental challenges. There were, of course, significant difficulties with massive ice drifts and shelves. However, the relative location of the expeditions to the north pole led to issues with magnetic variation for compasses. Fog further complicated travel (Williams & Costley, 2010).
There were also extreme mental dangers to pursuing the NWP. MooSmith’s expedition in the mid-1700s reported “potentially murderous quarrels between officers” (Williams & Costley, 2010, p. xvi); John Franklin noted that the things that occurred on his ship “must not be known” (p. xvi); and it was noted that on the McClure, Beckler, and Collinson expeditions, “tensions” erupted “as captains and subordinate officers exchanged threats of court martial, and some officers spend years under close arrest on their ships” (p. xvi).
In the time of Bridgerton: The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 allowed for greater expeditions by the British Royal Navy (Day, 2006). This would have included surveys of a large portion of the global north and the Arctic. There were a large number of “successful” (depending on how you define it) land expeditions that had made progress in producing surveys and maps of the region. Despite significant ongoing interest in discovering the Passage, in particular, little progress had been made. Later still, despite more advanced mapping by the Hudson Bay Company and expeditions by many notable sailors, there was still no route by the 1820s (Day, 2006).
What does it signify? If a character in Bridgerton was voyaging to the Arctic, it could take them less than a year to reach areas of the Hudson Bay that would be suitable for a scientific voyage. That in itself is not overly dangerous. However, the reference to the Northwest Passage is an interesting literary point. Of all of the places to voyage in the Arctic, even at the time, it would have been an immensely dangerous trip to set out on. The persistent lack of success for a solid 30 years after this season takes place may reference the fact that this is a voyage that Debling is unlikely to ever return from.
It doesn’t help that Debling’s odds are really stacked against him. He does not eat meat, one of the only renewable sources of food for arctic expeditions. There is little to no fresh naturally occurring produce (during the Coppermine expedition, the surviving crew members famously ate lichen to survive once they lost the favour of local indigenous groups and fur traders) and did not do well.
Certainly, it lends a very tragic potential element to the story. The Arctic, if mentioned alone, is not necessarily an overly dangerous location to travel to. Yes, marine travel in the 1800s was still a dangerous endeavour in its own right, let alone in an area as unnavigable by sea as the Arctic. However, the North, in many regions, had active whaling expeditions, Indigenous populations that were willing to trade and work with sailors, and (in some areas) active fur trades. If the purpose of Debling’s travel was only to highlight his unique interests and sense of purpose, the show had many methods of doing so. The choice to reference a notorious and dangerous Northwest Passage, there is an extremely interesting element of danger that is introduced.
What would this potential marriage mean for Penelope? Of course, Penelope’s name may be a reference to the wife of Odysseus, who unwillingly takes ten years to return home after the Trojan war. In contrast to Colin, who returns with a steadfast conviction, Debling, as a traveler, may represent a kind of eternal limbo for Penelope, should she marry him. Although Debling’s trip is set to take 3 years, it would be hard to prove his death. Likely, she would be a widow for years, if not her entire life, before they were able to locate his ship. The HMS Terror was famously lost in 1845 and not located until 2016(!). As a result, Penelope would likely be stuck at home, awaiting his return, in the same tragic fashion of her namesake in Greek mythology.
As such, not only is there a potential tragic reference to Debling’s future, but there is also a dark illusion to what Penelope’s life may look like as his wife. Of course, this is all based entirely on implication, but it is an interesting act of speculative foreshadowing.
Thanks for reading!
References
Brandt, A. (2011). The man who ate his boots: the tragic history of the search for the northwest passage. Anchor.
Day, A. (2006). Historical dictionary of the discovery and exploration of the Northwest Passage (Vol. 3). Scarecrow Press.
Panikkar, B., Lemmond, B., Else, B., & Murray, M. (2018). Ice over troubled waters: Navigating the Northwest Passage using Inuit knowledge and scientific information. Climate Research, 75(1), 81-94.
Williams, G., & Costley, S. (2010). Arctic labyrinth: The quest for the Northwest Passage. University of California Press.