Well, maybe not “afraid,” but perhaps a little spooked. It’s definitely one for the Coincidence Club.
As mentioned in the preceding post, I have recently finished “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf. Previously, I was merely commenting on an excerpt tangential to the plot, but for this post to make any sense I must offer a brief synopsis.
“Orlando” is an odd story in many ways. The eponymous protaganist starts out as the son of a rich noble some time around 1600. He has many adventures over the years, but a few of the odd things that happen are that when the story ends in 1928 Orlando is 36 years old, and that one morning sometime in the 17th century Orlando turned into a woman. That aside, one recurring theme throughout the book is an oak tree located on his/her estate and the poem she is composing and carries with her through the centuries called “The Oak Tree.”
The other day a friend asked if I had a certain old photo, so I pulled out the several boxes in the store room labelled “Bob’s stuff” and looked for it. No luck there, but I came across several old papers and posters which have not been seen for a decade or two. A couple of things compelled me to keep them out after the rest had been returned to the dusty shelves:some old family photos from my sister in an envelope post-marked in 1997, and a binder of some of my fragmentary scribbles from my younger days entitled “Prose 1979-1984,” which I’m surmising I gathered together in 1985 or so. Anyway, it’s odd that the very first document in the binder is a 3-page hand-written manuscript entitled “An Acorn.” I guess it’s some kind of psychedelic prose poem. It begins:
‘A small capsule – smooth and shiny on one end, and covered on the other by a hard, rough, protective cap – fell out of the sky and landed in a vast open field. The planets revolved in their spheres many times and the acorn grew into an oak tree.
I kinda like that sci-fi capsule thingy at the beginning. It goes on to describe the life of the oak tree until:
‘Finally the oak itself, perhaps due to the restlessness that develops over the centuries, lept into the sky in a giant spark of lightning, leaving behind a skeleton with foliage blazing in colors brighter than any autumn.
Waxing poetic that. Waxing! It goes on a few sentences after that, but alas, it ends with the totally dismal, “Finally the great oak was forgotten.”
So, an odd coincidence, no?
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