PurpleFontGirl

This symmetrical composition--the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end--may seem "novelistic" to you, and I'm willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by the mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death, or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

A palimpsest is a manuscript on which an earlier text has been effaced and the vellum or parchment reused for another. It was a common practice, particularly in medieval ecclesiastical circles, to rub out an earlier piece of writing by means of washing or scraping the manuscript, in order to prepare it for a new text. The motive for making palimpsests seems to have been largely economic--reusing parchment was cheaper than preparing new skin. Another motive may have been directed by the desire of Church officials to "convert" pagan Greek script by overlaying it with the word of God.

For poststructuralist literary critics, the palimpsest provides a model for the function of writing. Like Freud's discussion of The Mystic Writing Pad, the palimpsest foregrounds the fact that all writing takes place in the presence of other writings--that it is not people who "speak" language, but language which "speaks" people. Palimpsests subvert the concept of the author as the sole originary source of her work, and thus defer the "meaning" of a work down an endless chain of signification.

These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B.& I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do anyway." If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can ratchet up from B.& I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological foreplay.