The arrow of time

Ivan Voras' blog

Page 56

As seen elsewhere:

 

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open it to page 56.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
  5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

What I have is:

A soft blue twilight lay across the city, increasing by a hundredfold its air of magic and mystery. -- from Roger Zelazny's & Robert Sheckley's "A Farce to Be Reckoned With"

The quote is about a fictious version of Venice, where the majority of the story happenes. The story itself is a set in the same universe as Zelazny's "Bring me the head of Prince Charming", and has the same twisted-fairytale humor (though of a bit lesser quality than the original). Still, very enjoyable :)

Even better than this micro-game is thinking about the question why do we, and in this local case, I, play it? For me, it's mostly two things.

Firstly, it's a clever and amusing idea which is also (at least for me since I haven't seen it before) an original one. Books people read usually tell much about a person, and even more so for the books that are close at hand, for whatever reason. The fact that a seemingly "random" quote is sought and presented is irellevant because most people will also give the book's title and a few words of description - and if a book is kept close at hand it usually means the reader has something to say about it (or else it will be thrown back somewhere on the shelf). In fact, if I didn't give the book's title, readers of this post could have concluded just about anything about it, probably ranging from it being a romantic travelogue of a random city (the quote itself is very generic and actually nondescript) to a sword and sourcery / D&D-style low quality slash & burn novel.

The second reason is that, even if the act of posting something like this somewhere is a solitary, non-social event, it actually is a part of a social game, in which both those who just read the post and those who act to spread the game (meme?) participate. And thousands of years of evolution have built us to enjoy being social :)

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