Tuesday, 28 January 2020

Warmth And Light

Dominic Flandry is a dinner guest but:

"This warm, well-furnished, softly lighted room, where a recorded violin sang and from which a butler had just removed the dishes of an admirable rubyfruit souffle, was a very frail bubble to huddle in."
-A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, VIII, p. 442.

(Warmth, light, music, food.)

Manse Everard and Janne Floris go out to dinner:

"Maybe the sense of evanescence, this warmth and light and savor no more than a moment in an unbounded darkness, something that could come to never having been, gave depth to pleasure."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 6, p. 522.

(Warmth, light, savor.)

Maybe.

The Poul Anderson reader recognizes moments that resonate across two timelines.

In fact, see also Warmth And Light In Two Timelines.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Anderson wants to subtly tell us that all these good things guarded by a civilization is so precarious and subject to destruction that we should not take them for granted. Because civilization itself is so terribly fragile.

Ad astra! Sean