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question, and what I'm up to
The ninja girl has a question about Patricia Wrede's Enchanted Forest series. I read some books in the series and enjoyed them, but I have a notoriously bad memory, and I didn't read all of them, so I'm putting the question to you.
The magician character [quick Google search... ], Mendanbar: the ninja girl remembers an occasion where he (or possibly someone else??) creates a duplicate person/doppelgänger of someone, using magic. Does anyone remember such a thing? And if so, can you situate that plot piece? Also, what was the double called?
What I'm up to is I found a way to volunteer my skills (such as they are) for Ukraine. I don't know that it makes much difference at all, except for this: I get to work directly with people in Ukraine, and I feel like having sympathetic strangers step up and be a presence is something-not-nothing. If I was about to die and someone sat down next to me and smiled, that would be better than facing it alone. I do the volunteering in the morning hours, Kyiv time, which is the wee hours, my time, so I'm on a kind of sleep-deprivation high.
The magician character [quick Google search... ], Mendanbar: the ninja girl remembers an occasion where he (or possibly someone else??) creates a duplicate person/doppelgänger of someone, using magic. Does anyone remember such a thing? And if so, can you situate that plot piece? Also, what was the double called?
What I'm up to is I found a way to volunteer my skills (such as they are) for Ukraine. I don't know that it makes much difference at all, except for this: I get to work directly with people in Ukraine, and I feel like having sympathetic strangers step up and be a presence is something-not-nothing. If I was about to die and someone sat down next to me and smiled, that would be better than facing it alone. I do the volunteering in the morning hours, Kyiv time, which is the wee hours, my time, so I'm on a kind of sleep-deprivation high.
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I think that matters a LOT.
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More broadly, I feel like our society is one in which it's hard to offer presence. It's hard to be just a friendly face: our society seems to say "You can be friends with friends and everyone else you should ignore. Everyone else you have no connection with"--such that even if you yourself reject that formulation, the people around you are likely operating under it, which makes it hard for them to notice/accept a different pattern. Plus, everything about life today pushes toward isolation and becoming little self-sufficient islands unto ourselves (even without the pandemic this was true, I feel), even though in fact that's impossible (not to mention not desirable).
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Sheeyun and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, and I said that I thought it was due in part to a short of village life in our institutions. In village life, literal and metaphorical, you become friends or at least find viable relationship because they're there and so are you, and that's going to continue for some time. Undergraduate life is the last village experience in many US people's lives. Though there are workplace villages [much celebrated in sit-coms].
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--with the exception being people in need: those people do notice and appreciate presence, which gets back to the thing
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In which case, oh yes, what welcome merciful rain is companioning and explicit sympathy or empathy.
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