Sunday 1 January 2017

Angles

Alan Moore, Jerusalem (London, 2016).

Physically, all that happens in "Do As You Darn Well Pleasey" (pp. 243-261) is that mad John "Snowy" Vernall stands on a rooftop in Lambeth, London, while his wife gives birth on the street below. I think that we have met their daughter as an adult although I have not checked back and forth to confirm how many generations we are dealing with.

Vernall is conscious of each moment in that moment even though he also sees along the temporal dimension. He does not experience his entire world-line from birth to death in a single atemporal instant and, if he did, then he would not experience it because an experience that began and ended simultaneously would not exist. It would be the temporal equivalent of a perfectly flat plane with zero depth, a mathematical abstraction, not a concrete reality.

Vernall quotes, "Non Angli, sed Angeli," a phrase that we have met before. See here and here.

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