Hammerfall and a bigger world

I discuss C.J. Cherryh’s novel Hammerfall and the mind-blowing thing she does whereby her character discovers the world is so much bigger and more complex than he ever could have imagined, over and over and over.

Other texts that do a similar wonderful thing include: Laini Taylor’s Strange the Dreamer and A Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. To a certain extent, Lord of the Rings also does this, I realized, to my surprise.

There’s a lot of discussion of how this bigger world functions in literature but also in life. I see it happen a lot with students, who think they know, then discover they didn’t know, then find out they have no idea what’s the truth, then find themselves leveling up to encompass knowledge they had no scope for earlier. It’s truly glorious to witness this again and again.

There’s also an extended metaphor about this fancy desk I bought for cheap from a shed in the next county with no idea what I was getting, from a guy who didn’t know what he was selling. And Finland, which keeps showing up, doesn’t it? Let’s just move there. I like Finland. Nice pine trees. Nice lakes.

Wrapping my mind around the partitive case in Finnish this week is another example of something that I didn’t know I didn’t understand, thought I started to understand, realized I absolutely failed to understand it, then began to grasp it in ways I can’t quite articulate. Hurray!

Sacred cheese of life!