Man is is love and loves what vanishes.
What more is there to say?
What more is there to say? I don’t really have a lot of annotations for this postlude. I’m glad it’s in there; I think it’s fun; it may persuade you not to attempt to construct a time machine, or if you do construct a time machine, only to use it to visit the future.
p. 387
•epigraph: Perhaps having beggared my powers of imagination, I opted here for the merely obvious:
Would we not shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire.
§Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859).
•Nietzsche died in the nuthatch: Soberer eyes requested I change nuthatch to something less offensive, but apparently alternative I came up with more offensive, and eventually they gave up.
•Monte Cooke: His essay is really good! If you’re traveling back in time (he persuaded me) either you already succeeded or you already failed, and if you already succeeded someone may well have noticed and recorded it. So never try to go back in time to a situation where people would definitely have noticed and recorded it (e.g. right next to a Beatle at the rooftop convert); choose instead going to place where people may not notice (a Cretaceous swamp) or may notice but not record (e.g. a meeting of pre-Columbian Iroquois) or, best of all (as the book says) a place where a mysterious strange was both noticed and recorded. If you ever find in a nineteenth-century diary, say, an entry that reads “and then a strangely garbed fellow identifying himself as [your name] appeared from nowhere, claiming he had traveled from the future” you should probably go for it.
p. 389
•Lannes/von Tornë: I found these two fellows and their two fates in two different books I read years apart, and the delight I made in connecting them was the whole reason I shoehorned these unnecessary facts into an already overburdened chapter.
pp. 391ff
•notes: This bibliographic technique is my own, vaguely based on others I have seen but deprioritizing readability in favor of saving space.
Initially I had wanted to plug entries as something like: NY: HBJ, 1970; but copy editors insisted, perhaps psychotically, that it would have to be: New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. I’m lucky they only wrote out New York and not New York City! I know all those New Yorks would kill me, and honestly does it help anyone to be reminded where Macmillan resides? so I cut the city out altogether.
People, people, I had no fight for every page in this book, and too many notes would mean more cuts in the chapters proper. (I suggested, in vain, cutting the opening Notes to the Reader to save space.)
p. 403
•c.g.s.: This is cum grano salis: With a grain of salt. At first I had sprinkled g.g.s. here and there, and when an editor suggested no one would know what i meant, I blithely laughed. Surely the reader can just google up c.g.s.!
Then I tried googling c.g.s.
I mean, it’s there. You’ll get it eventually. But perhaps it’s not the easiest thing to google. So I converted most c.g.s.s to cum granis salis and left I think only this one. I figure if you’re reading the notes straight through, front to back, like a murder mystery, you’ll be able to figure this one out.
pp. 405ff
•And that’s it for annotations. I hope they were informative. I hope people of the future, when they scratch their heads over some inexplicable blunder in Impossible Histories, will find these notes and dig up a half-baked explanation.
I have another book coming out in a month—perhaps I will annotate that one, too? In any event, the garlands of quotations will continue, perhaps until doomsday. They will be my legacy.