I can connect/nothing with nothing
And sometimes it's okay that things have no necessary connection.
(Has sudden thought that this may be a suitable occasion to trot out George Eliot's lovely candle/mirror/lamp metaphor from Middlemarch*.)
Was chatting to Scottish Colleague about a recent book drawing substantially on stuff in our collections and both of us copped to the feeling that certain connections were being made which were perhaps not quite so, er, robust as the author would have liked them to be. But was obviously not really down with saying 'Yay! here is some interesting and cool and thought-provoking stuff about [certain historical era]' but had to make it all part of Some Grand Design or Unifying Theory'.
And okay, I R SRS Historian and endeavour to eschew the anecdotal and antiquarian, but I still think it might on occasion be better to juxtapose things and go 'Hmmmm. Interesting. Meaningful?' without feeling obliged to join a lot of theoretical dots to make them actually connected.
Which sort of segues into the people having online and rl identities and generally having different bits of their lives which don't necessary overlap or connect and which they don't particularly want to join up (if fact in many cases, heaven forbid).
Viz: Dorothy Hodgkin's colleague (don't have the biography to hand, but I lolled when I read this, because, only in England) who was a rabid communist and also leader of the local Morris side. (This might, I suppose, just maybe fit somewhere under Neglected Traditions of the Proletariat, but suspect it was more about dressing up and wagging those handkerchiefs.)
And Pam Mitford's husband who was a physicist of considerable distinction and a successful amateur jockey (also a major-league womaniser) but these things don't necessarily have any connection outside, I suppose, a Dick Francis thriller...
Which makes me think about people who want everything to connect and cohere, and therefore disconnect certain things from other things because it muddles them up, like that obit of Dick Francis which assumed that his wife, being the literature graduate, could not have been the one with the extensive acquaintance with noir thrillers. Or Madame Sosostris declaring to me that all intellectual women were hopeless about cooking.
Also, time I had a little note from the British Library asking me to differentiate myself as author of one thing from person of same name who had published on entirely different subject but was, in fact, The Same Hedgehog.
All things counter, original, spare, strange.
*Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement.
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