reading in hindsight: Or All the Seas With Oysters by Avram Davidson
Memory is a fickle thing. I’ve been doing some house cleaning recently, of the house in which I grew up, and while doing so I found lots of clothes hangers and paperclips, alligator clips and other office supply ephemera. And all of this brought to mind a story I remembered, by Avram Davidson.
So I dug around and found a copy, and it’s not nearly as strange a story as I remember it being. I have this vague memory of reading collected short stories of Davidson and them being very strange, and perhaps some of the ones I haven’t yet reread are very strange, but perhaps it’s just that my personal threshold is a lot higher than it used to be, from lots of reading.
The basic idea of the story is that there is an animal, whose life cycle goes from safety pins to coat hangers to bicycles, and the ebbs and flow of generations is why we sometimes cannot find a safety pin when we were sure we had many, or why there are so many abandoned bicycles on the side of the road.
The bit I’d misremembered were the safety pins. For some reason I thought it was paperclips, which is why my recent house cleaning experience brought the story to mind.
It’s always a strange experience reading a story from long ago; this particular story was written before I was born, around 1962, The story felt a bit old, in terms of the language, but it also felt a bit archaic, in terms of how the social interactions among the characters are described.
I can see though why the story struck in my memory, albeit imperfectly. Like many others, as gauged by the success of shows such as the X-files and Fringe, contemplate the possibility that there is something beyond the things we standardly see, and for me I can understand why.
We as humans have only been diligent in our exploration of the world around us, far and near, for few thousand years. Our ancient ancestors knew a great many things, and I keep being amazed at the articles in science magazines about what the ancients were capable of, but the world, the universe, is a vast and mysterious place, and we are to some extent bound by what we have witnessed and experienced in our local patch of the universe.
One example of this is the science coming out of the JWST and the observations we’re now able to make about the early history of the universe, and how we keep finding things that seem to test or challenge our current understanding of those early days of the everything that is.
And so why shouldn’t there be things that we have just overlooked, much closer to our own daily experiences. And this gets back to one of the reasons I like reading, particularly short stories, because they are such wonderful exercises of imagination and possibility.
multijimbo 