Random connections

I like finding connections between seemingly unrelated books. You'd like an example, you say? Well! Let's see how the following strikes you.

Take this passage from the book I just finished reading a couple days ago, The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald (a generally decent though oddly-to-glacially paced book), published in 2003. From the point of view of Madeleine, an eight year old girl:

Once upon a time there was a mountain cave. The Piper led the children into it, all except one who was lame and could not keep up. By the time that child arrived, the door had vanished and she was forlorn, never knowing whether she was lucky or just lonely. Who was that child? The lame one. The one who became a grown-up.

Through closed eyes, Madeleine can hear the voice of children from inside the mountain. Hers is among them. The wool of the carpet bristles her cheek, she keeps her eyes closed, listening.

How can a grown-up ever gain entry? Unless you become as one of these.... Not "innocent," just new. Raw and so very available to life. Why do grown-ups insist on childhood "innocence"? It's a static quality, but children are in flux, they grow, they change. The grown-ups want them to carry that precious thing they believe they too once had. And the children do carry it, because they are very strong. The problem is, they know. And they will do anything to protect the grown-ups from knowledge. The child knows that the grown-up values innocence, and the child assumes that this is because the grown-up is innocent and therefore must be protected from the truth. And if the ignorant grown-up is innocent, then the knowing child must be guilty. Like Madeleine.

Then look at this bit from the (far, far stranger) novel I'm now halfway through, Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn, published in 1989[*]. The narrator is a 38 year old hairless albino hunchback dwarf, recounting the story of her life growing up as the (closest-to-normal) child of carny parents:

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, "Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right." The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

You could write a thesis about this. Or an entire blog's worth of content about this. I won't. But you could.

Add to this the fact that The Way the Crow Flies, the book I picked at random off the TBR pile to escape the mental clutches of Thomas Pynchon, centers, like Gravity's Rainbow, in large part on the manufacture of the V-2 rocket in Germany during World War II, and that Geek Love deals with physical mutations in some ways similar to those experienced by the teens that populate Charle Burns's Black Hole, the graphic novel I read immediately after finishing Gravity's Rainbow, and you've got one reader here who can't help but wonder what isn't going to be connected to everything else for the indeterminate future.

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[*] Edit: I originally said the book was published in 1983; the actual year of publication was (I believe) 1989.