{"id":347,"date":"2015-02-04T18:31:33","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T23:31:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/?p=347"},"modified":"2015-02-11T17:13:01","modified_gmt":"2015-02-11T22:13:01","slug":"the-roof-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/2015\/02\/04\/the-roof-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Roof of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPerhaps we were in the roof of the world, where Chaucer had been with his eagle. Perhaps the rush and press of life ended here, the voices collecting in the rafters, repeating themselves into redundancy. Energy cannot be lost only transformed; where do the words go?\u201d (52).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This passage comes after the narrator and Louise have climbed up seemingly never-ending stairs to a \u201chigh wild room\u201d (51) where the narrator hears children\u2019s voices from below. The reference to Chaucer might at first be alienating, but even a reader unfamiliar with his work can grasp the idea that this \u201croof\u201d extends across not only space but time<\/em> as well, so old that Chaucer himself inhabited it. The narrator continues to paint this space as all encompassing through the (seemingly) contrasting ideas of \u201cending\u201d and \u201crepeating.\u201d On the one hand, they ruminate that this is the space where all<\/em> life ends, as if everything becomes trapped here. But the following focus on \u201crepeating\u201d and \u201credundancy\u201d signifies that the narrator\u2019s notion of \u201cending\u201d is atypical. For them, \u201cending\u201d refers to, for example, \u201cvoices collecting in the rafters,\u201d rather than voices disappearing completely. To end is not to cease existing, but to stop ascending any further in space\u2014to end is to stop progressing, to go in circles ad infinitum.<\/p>\n

The line \u201cenergy cannot be lost only transformed\u201d echoes this alternate idea of ending. Nothing in the world actually dissipates; things merely shift, collect, and repeat. Although the narrator was<\/em> rooted in an actual physical space, the repetition of the word \u201cperhaps\u201d suggests we are now deep\u00a0in the narrator\u2019s head<\/em>space, and that these themes of \u201credundancy\u201d and \u201crepetition\u201d extend beyond this room and this moment. As the rest of the novel has shown, the narrator often feels trapped in cycles they are complicit in perpetuating. The thought of transformation can be freeing but like a \u201croof\u201d it is also limiting and even frightening, because (ironically)\u00a0the narrator cannot see an end point\u2014they do not know where to direct their energy, and seems anxious about the thought of words being out of their control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cPerhaps we were in the roof of the world, where Chaucer had been with his eagle. Perhaps the rush and press of life ended here, the voices collecting in the rafters, repeating themselves into redundancy. Energy cannot be lost only transformed; where do the words go?\u201d (52). This passage comes after the narrator and Louise … Continue reading The Roof of the World<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1491,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2015-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}