(fleeting)


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@jhull @rnv Pretty good, no? And when I first read this, I was reminded of Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien stated that the character of Bombadil needed to be inexplicable from within the framework of the story, in order to lend Middle-earth, the “secondary creation,” a sense of reality. A story is coherent but a world is a tapestry of stories, rarely fitting together; meaning is therefore emergent, contingent, and prone to numberless revisions and amendments. The story deepens and begins to feel real when you can’t explain Bombadil, when you can’t explain Starbuck’s story-arc in the final season of Battlestar Galactica. You can’t explain the butterfly.