If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler
You are alone in a tree of stories and descriptions. Alone, for until you take that first step and open a page–any page, for there are no points that are not starting points, no res that cannot in medias–you have not begun to relate. Your connection to these stories is, at best, transactional. You are simply you, a reader who is not yet reading, an owner of books that are not yet opened. Or perhaps instead of an owner you are a curator; these were bequeathed you, and in truth you have not yet touched many of them. You step down each morning to the ground floor, where wait the rows and shelves of books for your perusal, and you do not often peruse. You are a reader, a Reader even, you have always been this in your image both internal and external, but of late there are other titles that have been given, or granted, to you, existing in uneasy states of exclusion and contradiction with that first title, or identity, that of Reader, which once sufficed but now can feel to you like nothing more than a relic, or indeed an embarrassment, a memory of when you were somehow less than you are now, and worse, a memory that is not incidental to that past you but is somehow fundamental, as if it was your Reading itself that defined you as less, that caused you to be less, by standards which you had not yet developed in those beforetimes but which you now hold to be correct, objective even, or at least of vital importance, not only to you but to the state of the entire world.
Let us try to elucidate this concept of “less.” To begin with, it must be said, from others’ perspectives you did not often exist–you were not considered, not talked about–indeed you were more of a fixture of a space not unlike this one, filled to the point of decoration with books, not unlike these ones–although how can you say for sure? there are so many books now, and your time has so many demands, or rather so many opportunities, delights even, that you cannot truly take the time to engage with these volumes, like or unlike, not the way you used to when you were (to return to our previous point) defined almost entirely by the space in which you did engage in such reading, ‘voraciously’ one might say, or perhaps ‘desperately,’ for you have come to wonder if you were not ensconced in some grandly futile endeavor to fill some internal void with the stuff of novels, of works academic and biographical and quasibiographical and pseudoauthoritative and profane and sacred and muted and liberating. Indeed, Void is the image that comes to mind when you do cast your mind back to those prehistoric days, your prologue; Void or possibly Avoid: you hid away, but in that hiding you had convinced yourself you were not hiding but rather taking the logical course of action for the betterment of your mind, your soul, and that all others beside yourself were the ones who avoided, in their cases avoiding the books that made up your own small world. You were convinced, then, that behind the eyes of other ponies were inner worlds that were smaller, less detailed, and above all less important than the worlds defined within the pages of your books; that after all, a book could contain many ponies, thousands even, all of them defined and elaborated upon to the extent appropriate to the importance of their characters, while regrettably, direct interaction with the ponies around you, your schoolmates, could be delimited by no such authorial wisdom. Consider, for example, an interaction you had once had with Moondancer, not even the worst among the ponies you were forced to see each day, in which she made no fewer than five observations on the state of the weather, three on the difficulty of your shared homework, one on the smell of freshly baked bread, and so on, all of which a skilled author would have excised or at worst, as here, summarized to illustrate some important point on the mundanity of casual conversation and acquaintance.
There were, it must be admitted, those rare ponies whose company did delight you. You will recall with what childlike delight you greeted your old foalsitter; with what combination of pride and wonder, your brother; even with what awed respect, your teacher, till she banished you from your place of refuge, maligning your beloved volumes with the sobriquet of “dusty”--worse, in that moment, than doubting their individual contents–and in so doing, forced your first reluctant, aggrieved steps onto the path of friendship, that path that now defines you even as Reader had before–although surely the presence of one path in your life, forcefully demanded of you though it was, need not preclude the presence of another, and you can walk both roads and bear (to speak plainly) the titles of Friend and Reader both, without their existing in conflict or contradiction with one another?
If you are to speak of authorial intent and discretion, you cannot fail to appreciate the importance of your teacher’s edict, and your subsequent banishment, upon your own story. It took you from a place that was predictable to one that was not; it dissolved your status quo; it provided an inciting incident; all fancy ways to say that you had a routine in your life, one in which you believed yourself happy, and then suddenly everything changed and, at the end of a perilous journey, you found yourself happy once more, but a different happy, the Friend happy and not the Reader happy. Owing your new happiness to that edict, how can you look at these books and not feel the sting of that old “dusty” once more? Or furthermore, how can you not bandage that old wound by accepting “dusty” into your own beliefs–by turning your back on these new books, integral though they may be to your home? To become Friend, you had to abandon Reader, so how could the two possibly coexist?
And yet, if you have already suffered through the loss of one status quo, could you not now handle a second? Perhaps this new life of yours could be upended just as easily, were there some single event to steer you off your path just as suddenly? But no, not today: this morning’s routine is just the same as every other, look at you go, a sudden spring in your step, dismissing this inner turmoil (for it was inner, do not doubt this) as you open the door from your treehouse and prepare to greet the winter morning’s chill with a smile.
Or perhaps it is today after all, for a mare is standing in front of your door; it seems she was waiting for you to let her in, for she trots immediately into your treehouse and begins talking to you, and so abrupt is this arrival that you start to doubt yourself: did you truly open the door for your own purposes, to exit this building and reenter the wider world, or did you open the door so that this new pony could enter this building and you could remain inside of it, letting the wider world come to see you? Although this mare, with her blue and white striped mane and her deep blue eyes, is of course but a single piece of the whole, you have tried often to solve that old puzzle that so perplexed you with Moondancer and the others… trying to justify to your younger self why you now spend all your time on Friendship, studying the one (another pony; five other ponies; a dragon; an owl) rather than the whole (the wider world; the story; magic), you have advanced many possible solutions, such as:
The one is integral to the whole, and the whole cannot be understood without the one. Or,
The one contains a piece of the whole, but that piece’s fractal geometry recaptures the entirety of the whole within it. Or,
The one is more similar to you than is the whole, and only from the one can you learn of yourself in turn. Or,
The one is being ignored while you run through this list, bringing up old theories that you had thought you were already finished with.
“I’m sorry,” you say, “my mind was somewhere else entirely, and I have forgotten to welcome you.”
“That’s quite all right,” she says. “I do not experience time in the same way that you do, and I was already partway through a conversation with you, which only today I happened to pick up again. A welcome would not have been appropriate when for me, we have already been speaking for several days.”
You close the door. Perhaps you are choosing not to let the cold of the morning into your house for too long, but perhaps you signal to your new guest that you intend to stay a while, and that her presence, while inexplicable, is not unwelcome.
“I have never met a pony who experiences time differently than I do,” you tell her. “Either I do not believe you, or I do not understand you.”
The other pony smiles. “I do not visit you to be believed or to be understood. Your skepticism is endearing, even... rather, I have been trying to convince you of an entirely unrelated point.”
“This is rather forward of you,” you say. “I am glad to know that I endear myself to you, but I would be gladder if I had the first idea of who you are. As a rule, we should begin with introductions and only from there move on to trying to convince each other. Suppose, for example, that I am to enjoy our conversation–even if at no point in it, do I ever believe or understand you–and then later, I wish to have another conversation with you, even on some other subject. Suppose then I wish to find you. I could hardly ask a friend if they knew where you lived, armed only with the knowledge I have gathered thus far: your attractive light blue coat and mane, your round eyes, your interest in convincing me of something, your endearment.”
The other pony turns away from you. “Does this help? I have an hourglass for a cutie mark. But that is not unique, and in any case I had not intended not to introduce myself, rather I had forgotten… again, we have been speaking for some time already. You can call me Minuette.”
“Is that your name?”
“It can serve as my name.”
“Well, I shall call you Minuette until we find something better. My name is Twilight Sparkle, though you act as if you already know that.”
You are something of a local celebrity yourself, so it is no great surprise nowadays to find other ponies who know you. Nonetheless, the polite thing is to introduce yourself no matter how false the humility may be, in this case in particular.
“Hmm,” says Minuette. She examines some of your bookshelves, although her attention seems to be drawn less to the individual books–their titles, for example, or even their authors, many of them prestigious in their own right–than their presence and quantity. You wait for her to resume, or else begin, your conversation.
“I would like to advance a theory,” says Minuette, in time. “Namely, that you were not Twilight Sparkle until now. You existed in a state of limited definition, addressable in the first or second person but nothing more; there were clues, certainly, that you were Twilight Sparkle, but there was also the possibility that you were someone external, or even someone generic. That your relationship to Twilight Sparkle was deliberately allowed to remain ambiguous so that you could serve also as a metaphor, in a way that means nothing now but may prove useful later, when revisiting our conversation and trying to understand whether it amounted to anything.”
“I agree with you,” you say, “that this theory means nothing now. From my perspective, I have never begun nor ceased to be Twilight Sparkle–my entire history of experience is defined completely within the bounds of me being Twilight Sparkle.”
“And are you Twilight Sparkle when you are alone?”
“Who else should I be but Twilight Sparkle?”
“Your mistake,” says Minuette, “lies in assuming that you are anyone. Twilight Sparkle is somepony that exists in relationship to others. When you are with others, you are being Twilight Sparkle, and in the process you are finding who Twilight Sparkle is, who she is to be. You are trying out Twilight Sparkles and at any given time you are discarding Twilight Sparkles. You are changing, growing, evolving, but in a way that brings danger, because often in order to discard a Twilight Sparkle, you must first be that Twilight Sparkle, and it is only in being that Twilight Sparkle that you can realize it is a Twilight Sparkle worth discarding, and if it is a Twilight Sparkle worth discarding, it must be because it is not a good Twilight Sparkle, and that can have negative effects on the others around you, even or in particular your friends.”
“Of course everypony makes mistakes,” you say, this time understanding her perfectly. “But it is precisely with friends that I feel the greatest freedom to experiment, because they understand that I am in that process you describe of growing and evolving.”
“You are very fortunate,” says Minuette. “But I would still have you consider a third option.”
“Which?”
The magic of her horn flickers and one of the books, a novel, flies toward you, stopping at a comfortable reading distance from your face. “When you read,” she says, “you are again relating to another pony, the author. But the author has already said her piece. Her part in the conversation has already been completed before you even realized there was a conversation to begin. You can be Twilight Sparkle as you like, dealing with what the author has to say, but there is nothing you can do to her… you are free to evolve without danger. You can be inspired by the author’s words and discover new ways to be Twilight Sparkle.”
Your gaze slides away from the book with unconsciously practiced ease. “I do not feel this danger or guilt you seem to associate with me,” you say. “Once I did, yes, but I am now comfortable in my friendships. In fact, as a result of your failure to convince me of your arguments, I now wish to abandon this conversation and seek out my friends right now, as I had already planned to do, before you arrived at my front door.”
Minuette replaces the book and nods. If she is hurt or surprised by your rejection, it is not obvious. Instead she says, “I will try again later. I’m sure you value your time with the pink pony, and the blue pony, and the yellow pony, and the orange pony, and the white pony.”
“That is reductive,” you say, “and unkind.”
“I shall do better,” she says, “the next time we meet.”
If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler
If On a Winter's Twilight a Time Traveler
I saw a beautiful mare recently.
There is a great deal to explain about this sentence of mine. “Recently” is at once both specific and vague, and it establishes that this event still features prominently in my mind, and yet was not so dramatic an event that I was compelled to memorize the exact year, month, day, hour, minute, and second at which I saw her. You may wish to decide from this choice of word that I have seen other beautiful mares before this one, while also preparing yourself to let the continuing narrative change your mind. Perhaps I have seen other mares, mares aplenty, but none that I had previously considered beautiful–perhaps I had not even realized that I could be attracted to mares–perhaps my understanding of the word “beautiful” does not align with yours, and you have yet to discover this, having read only one sentence into my novel and therefore not being very acquainted with me as an author–in any case, there is ample room for the significance of this event to be further elucidated on in future sentences, future chapters even. The first sentence of a novel is always of paramount importance, as established by a timeless contract between all writers and readers, so you trust implicitly that I will deliver on this contract and make the beautiful mare central to this unfolding narrative. Therefore, time and again may I revisit this mare and how beautiful she is, or rather, how beautiful I thought she was at this recent moment, when I saw her, and over time you will come to decide how much you trust both my initial assessment and my written recounting of it. You may ultimately decide that I am not a good writer, or at least, not the kind of writer whose writing you enjoy, or at least, a writer who is currently using a style that is not exactly her own, which might in equal likelihood delight or exasperate you… you might read on, ravenously awaiting each next trick I prepare to deploy in this borrowed style, or you might cast this entire novel away from you in disgust, being so put off by the style that you will never learn how beautiful the mare really was, nor what features of her made her so beautiful, nor what features she has at all, nor her name, her cutie mark, nothing. You might deprive yourself forever of all these important elements of this important event in my life (yes, mine: we will return to this point soon enough), and I will never know it. This is a sort of power you have over me, and yet I have a sort of power back, for my novel is here, is finished, is published, is available to and beloved by the masses, whereas your immediate reaction of disgust is nothing more than a fleeting fancy that will impress no one but yourself. Perhaps eventually you will even realize this for yourself and feel embarrassed, ashamed even, that you dared to have such a unrehearsedly negative reaction to this, my great work. You will be flipping through a high-class literary journal, as you often do, reading with delight and anticipation all the positive reviews for new and upcoming novels included in the journal, and above all else, your attention will be drawn to the review for If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler. So effusive will be the review in its praise, so constant and convincing in its recommendation, that you will leap from your seat–no, you will have stood up already, so completely the review will have consumed you with its passion!–and you will march to the nearest bookstore, where you will purchase If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler forthwith… in fact, being there already, perhaps you had better purchase five copies, you never know but you might need gifts for your loved ones for some upcoming holiday! The books bundled, your money paid, you will hurry home and begin reading (for you are of too high a class to open the book before reaching home), only to realize, in a period of increasing confusion, that you have read this book before… that you have read, before, me discussing this beautiful mare that I saw recently… only last time, you rejected this account of events completely! And yet, what of that glowing, starstruck review you read in that high-class literary journal? And can you really put this novel down now, having bought ten whole copies of it? No, there must have been something you missed before. Perhaps your intellect was not yet ready to truly appreciate my brilliance and the depth of my admiration for this mare, but now you have matured, now you are truly ready. You realize, then, in a moment of complete personal transformation, the importance of the word “recently”! You were in a bad mood the last time you read this novel, you had just gone through a bad breakup, you were not ready to read about love, but now times are different. You are inspired by that wonderful review in that excellent literary journal that you read, yes, recently! An event itself is nothing, an event must be situated in time and context to truly be appreciated! Now you are ready, now the mare was truly beautiful, and you read on, eager to learn more, to learn those other important facts about her that I mentioned earlier, and if you are initially disappointed because the novel quickly loses focus on the narrative and begins instead a long digression on the individual words of that first perfect sentence, followed perhaps even by several further digressions, well, you resolve nonetheless to read on, trusting now in my skills as a writer, believing with your entire heart that there is a reason for these digressions, that they are building up to something truly incredible, perhaps somehow even serving as indirect windows into some central facet of this beautiful mare, contributing to your ultimate understanding of her.
For what is literature, or art, but the pursuit and explication of beautiful mares? When I pose this question, you understand immediately that by “beautiful” I am no longer referring merely to physical beauty. For all that we are two sides of the artistic coin, the producer and the consumer, we share in our understanding of many of art’s conventions. Reading this digression, you of course comprehend that a mare can be beautiful in many ways, the physical only one among them, and that there can even be beauty in a mare’s worst qualities, her depravity and horror. Perhaps you, yourself, delight in such tales, the ones that shine lights on the darkest depths of a mare’s soul, and the cruelty she is prepared to inflect on others around her, but we do not need to talk of that today, we do not need to embarrass you in front of your friends who may not share such proclivities. What is important to art is the fact of the mare herself–any mare, every mare–for what adventures can there be, what heroism, what grand follies, without a mare to inspire them? What do any of us do that is not to impress a mare? What passions are not formed in the pursuit of mares? They are individuals, but more than that, they are unknowable; they are life itself. Even those of us who are mares ourselves are powerless in the face of mares. We may carry ourselves bravely, may claim to be unaffected, but in art we reveal this true fact about ourselves. As a reader, you know when you encounter a mare on a page that you must now pay attention: there is something important about this character, something tantalizing, something that cannot be grasped, and yet you must try. If a character is not a mare, but rather a dragon for example, you can rest assured they are there for purposes only of the story, some necessary building block to carry the flow of events from one point to another, or perhaps an undefined receptacle for the story’s broader themes… yet worthless, not to be thought of or troubled with, as an individual.
Our analysis now finally arrives at my novel’s first word, my novel’s first-person word, “I.” Consider for a moment the vast range of facts, or techniques, I am bringing to light with this all-important decision! First I establish an immediate air of mystery about myself. I refuse to give you even the slightest clue about myself or my character. My gender, race, even my species remain stubbornly unknowable, but only for now: this is not your first book, and you are confident that before you turn the final page of the novel, probably even the final page of this first chapter, you will receive some more details. Yet those details may be delivered in a piecemeal fashion, carefully doling them out to you one by one at a pace that only increases your appetite for more. What remains constant is your conviction that I must be employing this narrative device for some vital reason: the use of the first-person is integral to the story I am telling. Over time you will learn more of the beautiful mare but also of me, and as the mare and I come to know each other, so too shall you come to know us both, and you shall even project your own relationship with us onto our relationship with each other, all these relationships growing at the same time and blurring into one another. And yet there is another possibility that you must keep open while reading this novel–that this all-important I is in fact I, me, the author, and that the character within the novel is the same as the author of the novel–that this novel is, or at least pretends to be, autobiographical–certainly you did not notice any such warning on the outside of the novel when you purchased all those copies for yourself and your social circles, but you can be careless, perhaps that finer detail escaped your notice, or perhaps my publisher chose not to reveal it so openly. I had not previously mentioned the existence of a publisher, but of course this novel has one… even if this novel is autobiographical, even if I did in fact see a beautiful mare at some point prior to writing this, you cannot be sure that “my” voice in this novel is entirely mine. Perhaps I submitted a manuscript that was profound, from the heart, unaltered, and uncompromisingly personal, and then the editors at my publisher had their way with it. How can you know what liberties these editors took with my work? Perhaps they altered the language in artless ways to make it more commercial… perhaps a powerful anticapitalist message, running subtly yet inescapably through my original manuscript, was excised completely… perhaps I never saw a mare at all, however beautiful, but rather this mare was added wholesale to my novel by the faceless, nameless staff of my publisher. This entire first sentence could have been added from nothing, could have no connection to the rest of the novel at all. Perhaps this is a novel completely without mares, and only my editors realized this would not be a commercial success, so they took immediate action. Even if I were later to try to address this question, these same doubts would linger with you. I could walk directly into your house; I could engage with you in a conversation about the nature of character, and friendship, and time travel; I could introduce myself unambiguously as Minuette, showing you even my cutie mark as proof, and I could declare in the strongest possible terms that every word in this novel is indeed mine, is my heartfelt confession, free of even the faintest whisper of correction or censorship from any at my publisher’s; and yet still you could not believe me without any reservation, for what if my publisher had instructed me to do all this? What if every word whispered between us is a lie? Instead, the only way you feel that you can be certain is to continue reading, bringing to bear all your existing familiarity with my existing body of work, comparing closely every turn of phrase and every twist of plot, until you can be truly certain that this work of passion is mine and mine alone!
But I have spent enough time on these digressions that it may be time for me to start a second chapter… I will establish only one new fact about the beautiful mare, practically in passing, before I do, because a chapter should end on a note of suspense. I want you, while reading this new sentence, to carry with you the sensation of discovery. This next point should come out of nowhere, should fill you with amazement, should encourage you to turn the page. Your own world should feel drab and colorless compared to the world of my novel, despite their admitted similarities. I want you to feel a chill as you read these words, from the surprise as well as from the winter that surrounds my narrative. Are you ready? I will even repeat the first sentence to make it clearer for you how the two should flow together.
I saw a beautiful mare recently. Her name was Twilight Sparkle.
