But not for a lifetime

I wrote a dialog a few years ago with the thesis that if one were to read just one book, a novel, from that book, upon close and global analyses, you would find enough material to think about and concern you for the rest of your life. I used one book as my example, a somewhat controversial book. The name of the book doesn't matter, or shouldn't, and the first line wouldn't matter either.

Consider a most famous line from an American novel, "Call me Ishmael." Isn't there a world in a grain of sand in such a short sentence?

Not long enough? Try this one: "'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die." Of course, it would be nice to consider more, such as "'Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly.'" More than meets the eye, as the saying goes.

But I contend the length and more sentences around the first one not necessary. The one, the part reflects the whole and the whole the part, and that suffices for our manna, provided you put in the work, which is to question the text in whole and in part "endlessly."

Here are a few more famous first sentences to consider in light of this thesis.

    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

    A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's
    Rainbow (1973)

    Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)

    Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)

    Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

    riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of re circulation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)

    It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the seas on of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

    I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)

    The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)

    You don't know about me without yo u have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

Evocative, no? And these are just first sentences. Consider the worlds these open up when each book's total number of words/sentences are taken into a wholistic view.

I realize this is heresy, because some books are better (more worthy of study) than others. But that is according to some, and they may be right. For me the jury is still out, because I've walked the walk. Try it before judging.

Comes now an observation (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/scientists-reveal-multifractal-structure-of-finnegans-wake-james-joyce) not from an average reader, such as me, or a more sophisticated one, but science-types who authored a paper, "Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-range Correlations in Narrative Texts." The key finding is: "Studying characteristics of the sentence-length variability in a large corpus of world famous literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum . . . involves self-similar, cascade-like alternations of various lengths of sentences." In other words, the works of fiction examined, especially ones deemed stream of consciousness, revealed clear fractal qualities, to wit, the part mirrors the whole and the whole mirrors the part.

* Complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales, and
* Created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. (http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/)

If phenomenology reveals the structure and qualities of a phenomenon, is this then a clue to the written of its unique and coherent symmetry, therefore the knowable shape of the textures bound together? Such bound textures are made by writers when they write, and so writing becomes or is phenomenology.

Food for thought, although not for a lifetime.

Addendum

If the structure of a written object of consciousness reveals this fractal character, that then is one lens to view the structure of a phenomenon. It is perhaps a finer-grained fabric with which the essence of a phenomenon may otherwise disclose itself as a system of parts and whole and whole and parts with its content/themes/features-constrained relationships. And just as a fractal continuously and unendingly shows itself in whole and parts, so too might a text so constructed. A spiral of understandings has no bottom and no top?