Some Special Days

Because of our cultural heritage, certain phrases resonate in our consciousnesses whether or not an author intends any such resonance. When Poul Anderson wrote:

"On the third day he arose..."

- and Mike Carey wrote:

"...the third day he rose..."

(for both references, see On The Third Day)

- they obviously intended to remind us of something!

However, I am far less certain that Ian Fleming had anything particular in mind when he wrote:

"On the morning of the third day a bloody nightmare shook him awake, trembling and sweating."

-Casino Royale, CHAPTER 19, p. 132.

- or:

"...on the eighth day he asked for her..."

-ibid., CHAPTER 21, p. 149.

(For a possible significance of the eighth day, see again the link to "On The Third Day," above.)

In Facing Death, we referred to religious observances on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Two further points about Fridays:

Christians have fasted and abstained on Friday because it was the day of the Crucifixion;

I suspected that Muhammad had opted for Friday as the Muslim day of prayer just to be different from Jews and Christians and a Muslim friend acknowledged that some aspects of Islam have been instituted on such a basis but he nevertheless checked on the Internet and found that one significance of Friday is that it is the day on which Adam was created!

See A Self-Contained Universe.

If (mythologically speaking), God rested on the seventh day, having created human beings on the sixth day, then, yes, Adam was created on a Friday! (But note the two creation stories in Genesis, summarized in the linked post.)

I acknowledge without apology that passages in works by Anderson and other imaginative authors can generate lines of thought that carry us far away from those authors' texts. If my interests were different, then I would post more about Anderson's many references to world history or to the physical sciences. But other readers must follow their lines of interest. We might eventually compile a collection of "Anderson on Everything."