Sunday 15 January 2017

Some Ovid

("Ovid banished from Rome" by Turner.)

I was puzzled by an Ovid quote in Alan Moore's Jerusalem (London, 2016):

"Neve Liturarum pudeat: qui viderit illas. De Lachrymis factas sentiat esse meis." (p. 633)

After struggling with a dictionary, I googled. See here, lines 13-14. This fits the context. It is as if we have been transported to a literary hereafter where all the texts and their meanings are preserved forever.

Neil Gaiman's Library of Dreams contains all the books that have never been written, maybe including the adventures of Alan Moore's Dead Dead Gang? - although those adventures do exist as a fiction within the fiction. The Gang are surprised to be told:

"'Tetsy and I count ourselves amongst your most ardent admirers, and now here we are, right in the middle of your "Choking Child" chapter, saying all the parts of dialogue that we've already pored over a dozen times.'" (p. 624)

This is something that I imagined in childhood: reading a narrative in which I was a character, then looking up to see that the events described in the narrative were happening.

Meanwhile, the Library of Dreams must have a small annex for all the works that did get written?

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