Do you think everything happens for a reason?
As human beings we have this need to see or impose patterns on our lives. It’s the feeling that a ‘higher power’ does or should somehow have influence over our journey through life. When we have this feeling we often employ the Post Hoc Ergo Procter Hoc fallacy. This is Latin for After it therefore because of it. By using this approach we can see retrospective reasons for things happening which didn’t actually exist at the time.
As an example, I used to apply this fallacy to my first meeting with Janet. I went to work at the Unemployment Benefit Office after a spur of the moment decision to go to the job centre. This happened because I had an argument with my Dad who accused me quite rightly of making no effort to find a job. For many years afterwards I thought that the reason he said something was to get me to go to the job centre at the precise time I needed to so that I would meet Janet. When it’s written down it looks tenuous at best and ridiculous at worst, primarily because it is! What happened was a fortunate and random combination of events that led to our marriage.
It’s actually quite egotistical of us as a species to believe in their being a universe that exists in the form it does because people are moved around like pawns on a chessboard. It ties in, I suppose, with the anthropocentric beliefs that we are a divine creation above and separate from other animals. The truth is that we evolved alongside them and are no different in essence. You might just as well look at Albus, our cat, and see that we were meant to go to Cats Protection on a particular day to choose him. I doubt he sees it like that!
So, be grateful for your good fortune and fight through your bad fortune, but remember it’s all random however much you employ the Post Hoc Ergo Procter Hoc fallacy.
What’s a song lyric that has stuck with you forever?
As someone who has been steeped in music since early childhood, I could not possibly choose one lyric for this prompt. How do you choose between so many songs, thousands upon thousands over the years, and end up with one? The answer to this was actually right in front of me on Sunday night in Canterbury.
The Proclaimers have been a fixture of my musical landscape for the whole of my time with Janet. On our first weekend away I bought a copy of the 12″ single of Make My Heart Fly, a very minor hit that followed their massive debut single Letter from America. It starts with a plea that seemed perfect to my 22 year old self,
Please don't go rushing by. Stay and make my heart fly.
Nearly 40 years later, as I listened to them singing those words in their concert performance the fact that Janet is still there making my heart fly made me quite emotional. Mind you, by then my feelings had been brought to the surface more than once. It started with the marvellous Let’s Get Married, which we did nearly 36 years ago. Some of the lyrics which were nice enough 30 years ago hit home really hard at that concert. For example,
I love you and I want to stay with ya,have kids grow old and grey with ya,hold hands and walk in the park, Let's get married
The fact that all those things have happened, although luckily I’m not quite grey yet (!) brought tears to my eyes as it reminded me of how lucky I have been.
The other song to pick out from the evening is one of their signature tunes, Sunshine on Leith, one of the most beautiful songs ever recorded, lyrically and musically. The tune is sublime from first note to last and the lyrics are breathtaking.
My heart was broken, my heart was broken
Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow
My heart was broken, my heart was broken
You saw it, you claimed it
You touched it, you saved it
My tears are drying, my tears are drying
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you
My tears are drying, my tears are drying
Your beauty and kindness
Made tears clear my blindness
While I'm worth my room on this earth
I will be with you
While the Chief puts sunshine on Leith
I'll thank Him for His work
And your birth and my birth
My heart was broken, my heart was broken
Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow
My heart was broken, my heart was broken
You saw it, you claimed it
You touched it, you saved it
While I'm worth my room on this earth
I will be with you
While the Chief puts sunshine on Leith
I'll thank Him for His work
And your birth and my birth
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah...
It’s incredible especially when being sung by everyone in the concert, but what I realised is that those lyrics seem more perfect for our relationship now than when I first heard them in 1988. Thank you to Craig and Charlie Reid for the gift of their music over the past 40 years as they have found the correct words for my relationship with Janet, blending the universal with the deeply personal.
If you could bring back one dinosaur, which one would it be? A I Generated Picture Apart from being one of my favourite jokes in the film Airplane, and the dinosaur I was most interested in as a child, the reasons I would bring the Pterodactyl back to life are based on science, human nature […]
A Hat, A Brooch, A Pterodactyl!
A post I loved writing and one that got a decent number of likes! Click on the link above to read it in full as it’s quite well argued.
If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?
There are books I have enjoyed that I don’t think ended well. There are books I would have preferred to see stay as a single book rather than setting up a sequel. However, it seems to me the height of entitlement to say that I would rewrite an ending. The author has put months or years into getting the work to a finish and they have finished the book in the way that makes sense to them. I will have spent a few hours reading the book so I have no right to change anything. If I don’t like it I just shrug my shoulders and move on.
These prompts seem to be a bit of fun, a ‘what if’ piece of revisionism that doesn’t do any harm. Actually, it does. It diminishes the craft of writing to a simple equation where the ending ‘x’ can be seamlessly replaced by ending ‘y’ at the whim of someone who, in the vast majority of cases, has no idea of the huge amount of mental effort that goes into writing a complete book. I wrote three, over a period of four years, put two on Kindle where the only comments appeared to be critical, and gave up on that form of expression. I am a decent writer, in technical terms, but I was learning my craft and I chose to do it through the wrong medium. My blog has proven to me that I have an ability to engage an audience but just in a different way. By the way, those who do have experience of writing a book have even less reason to criticise an ending because they should know how much mental energy and emotional effort goes into writing.
I did dip into writing fan fiction many years ago and that was fun, and it wasn’t doing any harm to the original author or concept, because it was just an extension to the universe that had been created. So, write your own books, without any AI help (!), and create your new ending but don’t think for a minute that you have any right or ability to change someone else’s ending.
David Pearce - Popular Culture and Personal Passions 