A Milestone and A Millstone

You blink, and then it turns out you've hit Two Hundred and Fifty posts. I'm not certain that there's a really good way to mark this (though the suggestion of 250 paragraphs of 250 words each on 250 topics was advanced). Well, instead I have compiled the following list: 250 artworks, topics, images and so forth discussed by this blog. If the entry is in bold, there's probably most of a post devoted to it. That's at least one way to review the changing character of the blog.

To make this more than a list, please see also a little piece of writing afterwards. There is an extent to which the former is a clue to the latter, but I shall say no more.

1. Jack Vance's Dying Earth
2. Goblin Market
3. Wolfe's The Wizard Knight
4. The Song of Roland
5. The Kalevala
6. The Stress of Her Regard
7. The Cosmic Trilogy
8. The Banner Saga
9. Procopius
10. Count Belisarius
11. Marco Polo in the Court of Kublai Khan
12. The Pillow Book
13. The Book of the New Sun
14. Gormenghast
15. Virconium
16. Julie Taymor's Titus
17. Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder
18. Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle 
19. Gulliver's Travels
20. The Chronicles of Narnia
21. Van Dyck
22. The 52 Pages
23. King Solomon's Mines
24. The Pilgrim's Regress
25. The Pilgrim's Progress
26. John Ruskin
27. Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser
28. The Mignola-illustrated Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser
29. Macbeth
30. Coriolanus
31. Othello
32. MR James
33. Where Eagles Dare
34. Ice Cold in Alex
35. Shadowrun
36. Tim Powers's Declare
37. The Ill-Made Knight
38. Anathem
39. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
40. Mass Effect
41. Last of the Mohicans
42. Castle of the Otter
43. Aguirre, The Wrath of God
44. Mad Max
45. The Anabasis
46. Yoon-Suin
47. The Thousand and One Nights
48. Snow Crash
49. The Tower of Babel
50. Barsoom
51. Cyclopean architecture
52. Ruritania
53. Appendix N
54. Popski's Private Army
55. Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour
56. The Mughal Empire
57. Henry the Navigator
58. Dune
59. Fallout 
60. The Difference Engine
61. The Napoleon of Notting Hill
62. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
63. Shada
64. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
65. Discworld
66. John Wyndham
67. The Quatermass Experiment
68. Dan Dare
69. The Prisoner
70. Elric
71. Strontium Dog
72. Judge Dredd
73. Rogue Trooper
74. The Children of Men
75. Neverwhere
76. A Canticle for Liebowitz
77. The Saga of Recluce
78. Silverberg's Majipoor
79. The Third Man
80. Erast Fandorin
81. Rendezvous with Rama
82. Star Trek
83. The Culture
84. Firefly
85. The Blazing World
86. Lamentations of the Flame Princess
87. Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey
88. Blake's image of Urizen in The Ancient of Days
89. The Man who would be King
90. William Morris
91. The Poetic Edda
92. J R R Tolkien
93. A Sing of Ice and Fire
94. Tom Holt
95. Mere Christianity
96. Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler
97. Isaac Watts
98. Isle of the Unknown
99. The Winter's Tale
100. The Aeneid
101. Twelfth Night
102. The Tempestuous Voyage of Hopewell Shakespeare
103. Pygmalion and Galatea
104. The Steel Bonnets
105. The Dark Tower (CS Lewis)
106. Riddley Walker
107. Puck of Pook's Hill
108. Nathan J Anderson's Malacandra illustrations
109. Castle of Days
110. The Rivan Codex
111. The Mysteries of Udolpho
112. The Mausoleum of Thoedoric
113. Maria Lack Abbey
114. Trier Cathedral
115. The Book of the Long Sun
116. A Voyage to Arcturus
117. Nebulous
118. Iain Moncrieffe and Don Pottinger's Simple Heraldry - Cheerfully Illustrated
119. Clark Ashton Smith in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition The Emperor of Dreams 
120. The Monk
121. The Castle of Otranto
122. Ivanhoe
123. Arms and the Man
124. Flashman
125. The Mask of Demitrios
126. Barry Lyndon
127. Veins of the Earth
128. All Saints, Margaret Street
129. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race
130. Journey to the Centre of the Earth
131. The Gardens of Ynn
132. The Talos Principle
133. The Critias
134. The Timaeus
135. Journey to the West
136. Equestrian Portraits of Charles I
137. St Mary Le Strand
138. Raiders of the Lost Ark
139. The Diamond Age
140. The architecture of John Outram
141. The Ishtar Gate
142. Age of Mythology
143. St Peter and St Paul's Church, Pickering
144. Seeing Like a State
145. Reflections on the Revolution in France
146. 'Catapaulta' by Edward Poynter
147. The Stygian Library
148. The Name of the Rose
149. Roger Corman's 1964 film of The Masque of the Red Death
150. Paul Kidby's Discworld illustrations
151. Votan
152. Not For All the Gold in Ireland
153. The Ancient Greece of Odysseus
154. Marian and Trinitarian columns
155. Ilium and Olympos
156. Thackeray’s History of Henry Esmond 
157. Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon
158. A Song of Ice and Fire
159. The art of William Nicholson and James Pryde
160. Silent Titans
161. Seven Pillars of Wisdom
162. Shardik
163. Vita Sackville-West, The Eagle & The Dove
164. An Atlas of the Soviet Union
165. Doctor Syn
166. Mythago Wood
167. Stardust
168. Rogue Male
169. The Day of the Jackal
170. HCK's Maximalist City-State World
171. The Fall of the House of Usher
172. The House on the Borderlands 
173. HMS Apollyon
174. Excalibur
175. The Cruel Sea
176. Electric Bastionland
177. Francis Spufford's Red Plenty
178. Mistress of Mistresses
179. Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa
180. The Vorrh Trilogy
181. Tumanbey
182. The Well of the Unicorn
183. Joseph Wright of Derby, 'A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery', 1766
184. Appian's Roman History
185. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Monday Starts on Saturday
186. Garth Nix's 'Down to the Scum Quarter'
187. Fallen Empire
188. The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq and Willem van Ruytenburch
189. A Tale of Two Cities
190. Costumes from the 1883 Cambridge Greek Play production of The Birds
191. Fading Suns
192. Passion Plays
193. Richard III (1995)
194. Candide
195. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
196. Magical Industrial Revolution
197. Tales from the Mausoleum Club
198. Max Beerbohms's Seven Men and Two Others
199. Henry Kuttner, Fury
200. Northwest Smith
201. Fever-Dreaming Marlinko and Slumbering Ursine Dunes
202. The Bas-Lag Cycle
203. The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China 
204. State of Emergency
205. The Taheiki
206. Anvil of Ice
207. The Cthonic Codex of Paolo Greco
208. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
209. Warhammer Fantasy
210. A Very British Civil War
211. Conquest: the Last Argument of Kings
212. Demon Bone Sarcophagus
213. Time Bandits
214. John Dryden
215. Hic Sunt Myrmeleones
216. Spanish-suited playing cards
217. They Were Defeated
218. Lazarus and World of Lazarus
219. The Dragon Waiting
220. The history plays of Mike Walker
221. The Dream of the Red Chamber
222. Jack Vance's Emphyrio
223. The Metabarons & The Incal
224. Pilgrim (not the radio plays)
225. Layer Cake
226. The Search for the Perfect Language
227. Dr Zhivago
228. The Ring Cycle
229. The High Crusade
230. Giulio Cesare in Egitto
231. Lord of Light
232. Dorothy L Sayers
233. The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks
234. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
235. The Knight in Panther Skin
236. The Last Coin
237. Tales of the Alhambra
238. Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game
239. Mouse or Rat?
240. An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears
241. Conan the Barbarian
242. Diplomacy
243. Holinshed's Chronicles
244. Tales of Hoffman
245. Indo-Saracenic architecture
246. Ely Cathedral
247. Ronald Blythe's Akenfield
248. Towers of Trebizond
249. Evelyn Waugh's Helena
250. Troika!

***

So, you've probably been cursed.

You opened the book. You touched the little statue in the dark alcove. It was something like that, surely. Now you see things.

    There's a world beyond this one. A world of constant violence, of struggle. You see men there, or things very like men. They fight and they talk: they talk about fighting, they fight about talking, they fight about fighting, they talk about talking. It's riveting, but it shouldn't be a surprise to you. The ancients, after all, could enjoy rhetoric and wrestling both.

    For a time - for a few times still - you walk the pavements, you sit at your desk, you sway in the train carriage, and there's a thrill to it. You know what's waiting for you when you close your eyes. There a world beyond this one, and there's always something happening there, monumental in every moment. The details flash into your head: place, costume, mannerisms, scene, weapons, names, faces, deeds. 

    And then you concentrate a little, and you see a little more. There's someone telling you all this. Even if there's no narrator's voice, there's a choice in what you see, what you hear. So you think about them, and maybe there isn't only one. Or maybe there wasn't ever any more. But you are locked into the deciphering process. When you sleep, when you speak, when you drink, part of you is working away at it. Work is fun: don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Labouring away at something you love is rewarding and satisfying and occasionally beautiful, and now you can do it all the time. 

    Really, you're quite lucky.

    But anyway, that part of it all aside, you also reflect on the events playing out. The characters - who fold and refold on one another, archetypes or commentaries or variations upon a source. If the things you see didn't vary so wildly in its people and moments or appear on so vast a scale, you might become dizzy with the degrees of sameness. And this too is a mystery, and thus an amusement. The ticking of your brain, as familiar and as alien as your heartbeat, or the music of the spheres, is slowly changing its rhythms to match.

    Then there's a slight change in the visions. It started with a slowing, an approach to the sort of crescendo you expect. It didn't quite stay that slow, and it didn't quite ever stop being that slow. There's an oddness to it. Figures - men - beasts - demigods - angels - circle you, warring and declaiming and crying out and beating their breasts. They clash and reset: swing, address, return. The motion round you is faster and faster, the figures ever more solid, ever better-defined in detail, ever more ready to spring to life. It is like staring at a circle of monoliths, framed gloriously against the sun, and knowing at the deepest conceivable level that these rocks will leap, will blur into sudden, astounding motion - and perhaps they did, and perhaps they did. 

    Again, you think again. You dip your head in cold water. You stretch. You ease your body. There are those sorts of problems that you need to step away from occasionally. Again, you think, again.

    It isn't like it was - well, of course it isn't! Never could be: some processes change you. Not something to lament overlong. But maybe you can capture a glimpse of what it was, once in a while. 

    Perhaps you might talk it over with someone. But this isn't really the sort of thing for polite conversation. Too much finicky background to lay out. Too much violence, too much religion, too much politics. Other people must know of it, though, mustn't they? 

    You can't recall who gave you the book. If it was a book. The picture. The play. The mezzotint. But it had to have come from somewhere. The world - this world - is not so strange that such things can creep up on you all on there own. There was a chain of cause and effect. Somebody gave you the book, long ago.

    So you search, and you do not search in vain. There are people who have seen something of what you've seen. But they won't talk about it, or they'll talk about all the wrong bits in tedious detail and in obvious ignorance of all the most vital points. The process is fruitless, and you get some very scathing looks into the bargain. 

    That doesn't matter, though. You've got work before you, and a handful of social ties to cultivate and maintain, and at the end of it all, a whole other world to go back to. 

    So you do. There's something coming, you can feel it. Something terrible and thrilling and revelatory, so literally apocalyptic, in its content and implications. 

    And then it's not there. Not there at all. Neither climax nor anticlimax, but still it persists. Believe it or not. The stone gathers neither moss nor speed, but it does keep rolling. There's a hint of tedium in the air, like the fug of men trapped too long indoors. Hell's bells, but it's dull. Still, you have to dig in. The initiate into new knowledge undergoes several trials, remember. 

    There is a biting of the bottom lip, a gnawing of fingernails, a wanness of countenance. Has someone commented on it? Vanity: most people you know have far better things to do than comment on your appearance. Whether or not they are, you apply nose to grindstone for a solid fortnight. They might call you a boring So-and-So now, but that's probably preferable than remarks about bloodshot eyes.

    You go back. You think things have changed. Perhaps they even have. Things move slowly, like a cinema reel put into a slide projector. There's a whirring from somewhere, and the sight of dust motes in a beam of light. The image is changing, slowly, resolving before your eye into what you always knew it would be. There should be comfort in that.

    The day is overcast. It is cool, but not chill. Your lunch hour is almost over. You pick up the little book from the bench, and slip it into your pocket. You'll be going back soon. 

***