Journey to the center
by Bob on March 18, 2007
I picked up to re-read a book and, as with many opening paragraphs and chapters, it meant something more than when reading it some time before.
The book I went to re-read was "Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne. I had been explaining to someone about the purported Hollow Earth theory and mentioned about Verne's book, albeit science fiction, per se.
So when I opened the book, the first lines lept out at me.
"Looking back to all that has occurred to me since that eventful day, I am scarcely able to believe in the reality of my adventures. They were truly so wonderful that even now I am bewildered when I think of them."
Where a day seems to be as a metaphor, or a macrocosm for a lifetime, although that was not what Jules Verne likely intended. It was just the way it struck me on this reading.
Then I thought about the 1968 rock song by The Amboy Dukes, "Journey to the Center of Your Mind". It reverberated in my thoughts.
Then I had to get back to the Hollow Earth theory so I could explain some more later.
I had admittedly been thinking about W.B. Yeats poem, "The Second Coming", and the lines which talk about the importance of a center: "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ..." Amazing. H.G. Wells wrote "The Outline of History" as a reaction to and after World War I, and Yeats wrote this poem as a reaction to it also. Brilliant.
Books are like old friends: they need to be visited and re-visited. And with each visit, we can see new things we hadn't seen before. Old things become new again. And there might not be anything new under the Sun. Maybe.