All the Tale that Fits

There's a missing page in my Faulkner book, right in the middle of a crucial scene. I admit, I'm remiss in my modern classics. This is the first Faulkner I've read. In fact, I read this book because Faulkner himself took a prospective writer to task in a letter, suggesting that this person first read a series of books by some fairly well-know authors -- Hardy, Dostoevsky, Mann -- before revising a manuscript. I hadn't read any of the books on the list, although I'd read The Mayor of Casterbridge long ago. Because I had to. But there's no time like the present, so I headed for our brand-new library -- and its ready supply of around twelve books -- to borrow what I could.

So there I was, on page 221, in the middle of a long-winded explanation by Lucas Beauchamp of what really happened that night. An awful lot of the juicy details seem to have been on page 222, because that page wasn't there. In its place was another page 220, as if the monologue had a skip in it and had started all over again.

And in the world of personal blogs, this is a metaphor for life. You're actually getting somewhere, and there's a skip in the record, and you start all over again. Except that nobody really knows what a record is, and the term "skip" is practically meaningless unless you explain that a skip is what happens when you're playing a CD in the car and you go over a particularly vicious bump and the song suddenly jumps to an earlier time. Unless the recipient of your wisdom knows nothing but iPods, especially the ones based on flash memory, the ones that don't skip. Then you'll get one of those looks that says that you're either crazy or very old. Or both.

And with any luck, your mind will skip back to an earlier time, a happier time, a time before iPods and cell phones, when people had to talk to one another face to face, had to whistle or even sing aloud, and actually had to wait tens of minutes for food to cook. But it will be only a momentary revery; something will jog you back to the future, something like the car hitting an enormous pothole.

And once again you'll find that your memory has a hole in it, a skip, a missing page 220, and you may never know what Lucas saw that night.