A big part of the reason that I get so excited about the covers on my own books (especially if they’re good!) is that I shop for books by their covers. I never believed this was true, until Mr. C. asked me what the books I’d just bought were about and I couldn’t give him a good answer. They looked great, though. That happened years ago and now I recognize my weakness.
This is also why brick and mortar bookstores tend to be more expensive for me.
It’s particularly fun when a book’s cover snags your attention and the book turns out to be exactly what you’d anticipated. Maybe even better. This is packaging doing its work well. I recently snagged a non-fiction book with a great cover – it has the pre-Raphaelite illustration, Morgan le Fay, Queen of Avalon, by Frederick Augustus Sandys on the cover. The book is called BEHIND THE CRYSTAL BALL by Anthony Aveni and this is the revised edition.
What an interesting book. Mr. Aveni examines the parallels between magic – particularly that of antiquity – and modern science, his hypothesis being that they are expressions of the same desire to explain and understand the world, and not actually that different. What’s different is the perspective of the practitioners – or their world view – not their systems.
He’s given me a number of things to think about – plus I now know a lot more about hepatoscopy. (That would be the divining the future through the examination of the livers of ritually slaughtered animals. Now you know.) It’s always possible that such details will be useful one day.
Here’s the bit that has me thinking today, from page 123: he’s talking about the change of worldview, from the medieval conviction that everything was embued with the essence of God and expressed His will, to the scientific perspective of laws of motion and other physical cause and effect.
“Traversing the boundary between Dante and Copernicus, our role changes from active agent to helpless bystander. When we crossed the Copernican barrier on our historical clocks, we passed out of the realm of quasi-immaterial forces akin to the spirit – forces that exist in nonphysical entities like number and name. We traversed the ideological line into the theater of physical causes governed by natural law where you and I are subject only to the mindless action of matter instead of being engaged in a conscious dialogue with it.”
Admittedly, this may prompt less of an AHA! from you, as you haven’t read the 122 pages immediately preceding it. But it makes me think of our notions of self-definition, and our ideas of the future – is it pre-determined or open to revision? – drawing in the whole free will vs. destiny argument.
It reminds me of the premise of tarot cards, that the cards show the future that is most likely when they are read, but any change in circumstances (even those deliberately chosen, which is presumably why the cards were read) can alter that future. Does the scientific perspective preclude this idea of a future in flux? I want to see where Mr. Aveni goes with this idea – maybe our destinations are the same, but maybe not.
Once I’ve finished the book and pulled my thoughts into some kind of coherence, I’ll post about it again. For now, I’m continuing to enjoy it and the questions it provokes.
And next week, I get to read fiction again. 🙂 Ha! I have a huge pile of candidates and we’ll see how many I manage to read in a week.
What are you reading right now?
Deborah Cooke: Author 