TLD - A Reader's Experience

[earthbrah]

Well, the story is complete. I am feeling many things in the wake of completing it: nostalgia, sadness, satisfaction, exuberance, confusion, disappointment, amazement…the list goes on. But I want to share my experience while I was immersed in the reading itself.

Last April I began experiencing a relentless barrage of déjà vu instances. From then till now I have had anywhere from several a day to several an hour. Initially, these moments were felt/seen/experienced as distinct moments I have had in dreams from my past. Mostly those were brought on by an image in my immediate environment. Over time the character of these moments changed shape. All of my senses got involved. I would have moments where a smell or a sound would trigger the déjà vu experience. I would have moments where an image would invoke a sound or sensation that I definitely experienced before but in a completely different context. Or the sense of familiarity generated an intense novelty because I cannot recall EVER having experienced that thing before. In all this time and with all these moments, the experience itself has become sort of numb. They do not have the glamour or intensity they did back in April/May when they began, and yet they continue. My experience with reading TLD is peppered with these moments.

While reading TLD, there were too many of these moments! Two or three déjà vu feelings per page was not strange to me in the reading. A word or a phrase would elicit the feeling; a smell engendered by the words used would cause it to arise; an instant of visualization would cause a flood of memory to rush forth feeling like what I was reading was somehow connected to unrelated experiences from my past. Even stranger were the many moments when it seemed that what I was reading was something I had already read. Despite the immense novelty of the events in the book, I continued to have the experience of it being something eerily familiar and old.

I am finding it really hard to put this experience into words (have been ever since this relentless onslaught of déjà vu started 7 months ago). I stopped trying to interpret what it means and have instead just been letting it flow and trying to feel the joy that is present in those moments. And in this light, my experience of reading TLD was filled with remembered joy. It also filled the experience with a kind of converged insequence, like I already knew this story, like even though I had not actually read it before it nonetheless was an experience of unforgotten recognition.

Though I don’t expect anyone else to have had this specific experience, I bet there’s some cool stuff that others have to share about theirs while reading this last installment in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Share at will! Joy is in the ears that hear (or in the eyes that read).

[Zarathustra]

I had these experiences while reading Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger ... which is a book that deals specifically with synchronicity and coincidence. I picked up the book on a random day and finished it three days later, on July 23. I remember because the was the single most "synchronous" day of the year, according to the book. It was pretty weird ... but ultimately meaningless, I suspect.

[lurch]

I think the author broke his personal record of his use of the word " lurch" in TLD...I mean, everytime I turned around, there I was. Like , I was having DeNiro moments almost constantly,," You Talking to ME?!..I, I don't see anybody else around here,,so you Must be talking to Me!!"...

In all reality,,i did just the opposite of you earth. I knew it was coming to me as a present, so I cleared my head of any expectations, premonitions, needs or wants. And tried to take it on its own terms. I couldn't stop reading it.

[Condign]

There was a LOT of nostalgia in the last book - visiting old friends, old ideas, old ways of writing.

It washed over me like a pleasantly warm bath after a good work-out, with aching muscles. It felt good to be in a place I knew and recognised.

Perhaps this triggered your feeling of deja vu.