Ummm....that
Also, I do not think we are always moving towards chaos precisely. Well, we are but, we also are not at the same time.
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Brice,
I read this in our local library, and LAUGHED so hard, and so out loud
I may have likely been asked to "shhhhh" . Thank you for that, I
really needed it. Its funny also that for the past few years, the best
belly buster laughs I've had, were for the most part over something
said on TDT.sites. You are most definately wonderful for my health!!
:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: PS The fact that I work in a hospital
made way for another entire perception to this joke! phew! funny stuff!
Wow, thank you all for your awesome responses, its an interesting topic, so many meanings available to interpret.
What I always found an interesting paradox was that although everyone in Rolands world seemed to be aware the world was moving on, the animals seemed to be healing what hurts had been done to them, the threaded stock etc. So even if the world was moving on, it was also healing in ways, so what was it 'moving on' to?
Ha ha! I knew you worked in a hospital. :lol: That fact kind of led me to this joke a little. A few nights prior to that post I was stuck in the ER over night for a severe toothache, and ended up waiting for like seven hours before even being seen at all. The ER was empty that night...like barren and desolate empty. I saw tumbleweeds roll by between the waiting room chairs. :arg: There were no other emergencies and no ambulances came in, thus making my toothache one. When they finally took me to the back it wasn't ten minutes before I was being let go with scrips. I later found out they close half of the ER at night and on this night they had only one doctor in the ER, but apparently one patient was too many for him. :lol: Anyhow, your comment regarding there being no time just got me to thinking (while high on percs) and that's how one led to the other. I'm glad I could make you laugh. :huglove:
:D I think the natural order of things is a deepy intertwined random and purpose which can't be separated. Both are dependent on each other. Chaos and order need each other. They're like this: :couple:
that's what I think, too. It's the breach of this balance (which I am not sure is 50/50, but rather some ratio that enables this balance to exist) that I see as "moving on". In the book it was shifting towards the Chaos pole; I wonder what it all would look like if shifting towards the Order pole - not less abominable, I believe, but very different. Like, everything becomes predictable and you can more and more easily calculate consequences of any action... and the number of options (for anything) is decreasing... and such like
I guess it means you disagree, AllHail. Am I right? :D
I personally think that the "moving on" was more important to the first, older print of The Gunslinger. The whole book is about the reasons, culminating in the palaver between Roland and Walter. Walter tells Roland to imagine a blade of grass that is dying and what if the world were just a speck withing that curling, browning blade? It's nature.
The "moving on" became somewhat less important, I think, as the series developed, because there was a deepening of the cosmology, it became about the beams and Tower, etc.
One can also use the "moving on" in a world within a world metaphor for the whole series. Roland's world has certainly moves on, with the sweeping away of Gilead and the fall of all In-World's structure. But in contrast, when the tet arrives in the Calla, the world there seems to be going on quite nicely.
True there are mutie problems, and the Wolves, but as far as farming, building, raising children, food, water, celebrations, civil order seems to be maintaining itself. So "the world moving on" is a relative term in the books. The mighty swept away while the regular people go on as they always have.
Should we worry about the when? Maybe it's a particular multiverse that deserves our attention, and not the time.
Hmmm... I don't know. I felt the fact "the world has moved on" thing was quite in the cetral all the time in the series.
Anyway right now I think the world is always moving on. All the time, noone can stop it and it's natural. Everything is moving on all the time, stars... planets... dust... you... everything.
Moreover I say if the Tower fell the things the universes would stop moving on and that would mean the end of life... or all the lives it's hard to say which.
But
"moving on" and "moved on" are not the same (at least for me).
If we say the world has moved on it means that it left something that was important in the past. But it must happen... we can't help.
Roland world has moved on.
And I say our world has moved on, too.
That's how I feel.
I can understand thet, but I don't agree. While the wolves came and took 1/2 of each set of twins that were of a certain age, it didn't really change the over-all way of living. It mayhap made for a very sad occasion when Andy announced the coming, but basically the daily living (when we join the Calla folken at the beginning of Wolves) is the same. Farming goes on, the town leadership goes on, Callahan preaches, the Sisters throw their plates. And as we've seen, the Wolves had been taking children for generations, evidently the town was still having babies and sustaining the Wolves. So I didn't see much of the "moving on" as-it-were.
Just a horrible relationship of the Wolves preying on the Callas as they lived their lives.
Do you think that's true of people who have mentally handicapped children? That they have their souls and minds killed slowly? Why would this ruin anything...having to care for person who is "ruined". While it may seem crude and something we wouldn't do, we saw that at least some ruint people were useful in their state.
By the time we join the Callas, this has already been going on for over a hundred years. Since Grandpere was young. Don't you think that after over a century, it would have either driven out the Calla folken, or broken them long before?
I don't think it's the same. I mean if you have a child you love him or her as she is - she can be a genious normal or stupid.
But if you have a beautiful clever child and she gets kidnapped and when you get her back she can't think or talk anymore and her own body stops her having a normal life and you have no idea what pains and tortures she had to bear while she was away... to see that, yeah I think it can kill a mother heart day by day.
It does change the over-all way of living.
So for me the two things are absolutely different.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
I have always viewed the multiverse as a glass ball. At some time in the ancient past that ball was broken and magic (the Prim) began to seep out. Within this ball worlds were constantly moving on and dieing only to be reborn in the primordial soup of the Prim. When the ball was broken and the Prim began to recede worlds that once could have died only to be rebuilt and renewed only died. These worlds’ dead and rotting corpses spread cancers and diseases to the other worlds they touched.
End of the series spoiler:
Spoiler: 01-30-2008 01:11 AMJeandear friends,
please mark your spoilers
http://i91.photobucket.com/albums/k2...hank_you-1.gif 11-09-2009 08:42 PMoverhoserWhen I think of the phrase "moved on", I think of how something is left behind. You look in a shop window and then move on. So, to think about how Roland's world has moved on (since moving on and moved on are two different things as someone else mentioned), is to think about what has been left behind.
Thinking about it in that way makes me think about the movie Soylent Green. The tagline for that movie is something to the effect of "The people are the same. But what they need has changed." In the world of Soylent Green, paper is rare and expensive as is beef. All of the machinery (at least that owned by the common folk) is broken. But, as the tagline says, the people haven't changed. The world has moved on, but the people have not.
I think it's the same for Roland's world. The world itself has moved on, but the people haven't changed. They've been left behind. As one person said before, the world is always moving on, either for the good or the bad. The question is once it has moved, which direction has it gone.
For further thought, here's a quote for how Jake thinks about how the world has moved on:
"here things were in a spiral, not a circle. For the ka-tet of nineteen things were tightening up even as the world around them grew old, grew loose, shut down, shed pieces of itself" (Wolves, p. 567). 11-09-2009 10:36 PMLettiI think people do change. Of course the basics stay the same... we need to love and to be loved and stuff like that still people can be horribly different. Just think of Lud. Or the slow mutants under the mountain. 11-10-2009 07:26 AMoverhoserThat's true, Lud is an example of the people moving on along with the world. They degenerated along with the technology of their city. It definitely puts a hole in my thinking about the phrase.
But there are more examples where that's not the case...Tull seemed to be carrying on. The red headed guy in the desert that was also in Mejis. River Crossing. The outer arc. All of these people have been left behind. Remnants of an earlier time, trying to maintain even as the world itself crumbled. 11-10-2009 11:48 PMJeanPeople in River Crossing didn't strike me as left behind. I think of them rather as of those who remained to preserve the basic values while everyone else rushed on along with the world. 11-11-2009 05:13 AMSickroseI alwys thought it was a comment about technology and how the Old People tried to undersand everything, how the universe works, magic ETC and in the end meddled and emulate it or improve it fully i.e the doors made by the Old People which don't workd as well as the ones made my magic. Furthermore they are falable and that's why the world seems to be dying.
If they had just not tried to know everything and meddle then Roland's world wouldnt be dying which is what it seems like to me. For example the sounds of machinery wearing down.
The move is away from magic towads technology. I always thought it ws a metaphor for saying technology is good but we have to except universal laws which we cannot understand and shouldnt meddle in.
I agree about the people in River Crossing - I always like reading the bit where Roland meets them. There are different examples of how people have dealt with the world moving on.
Roland and his tet are hope like the threaded stock - it could be that three will be reversal because most of the inventions of the Old People cannot be used anymore.