Bertram's Blog

I feel as if I should apologize for all these Wheel of Time posts, and yet, here I still am.

In an effort to find an alternative to posting here, I looked for book discussions, thinking it would be fun to talk about the story, characters, and implications of the various events with other students of the work, but the discussions fell into a few distinct categories:

Discussions during the long years while fans waited for a new book to be published, most centering on where they thought the story was going, and which are now defunct because the series of books is finished and the ending, or at least an ending, is known.

Discussions centered on who loved what character, and how foolish were those who didn’t like said character. That sort of non-discussion gets old, especially if you hold a minority opinion and don’t want to be lambasted.

Discussions about the end of the book, and how wonderful the ending was, or if not how wonderful the ending was, how wonderful the substitute writer was for writing it (ignoring the fact that he got paid, and even more importantly, that the project catapulted him into fantasy superstardom).

None of those discussions fit with anything I wanted to discuss, and anyway, most were many years old. Any newer discussions revolved around the now cancelled television series, and how terrible/wonderful the show was. (Terrible because it turned the story into something completely different from the books, wonderful because . . .  well, because it was the Wheel of Time.)

I tried starting my own discussion, but only got the usual fan-type comments such as “I liked character A, I hated character B.”

I considered resurrecting one of my dormant blogs and doing a chapter-by-chapter discussion, but that didn’t appeal to me. I like the puzzle the books present, and I like that in some ways it is (was?) a cultural phenomenon, with many more millions of words written about the books than were actually in the books (the first book was published right around the time the internet, discussion boards, and social sites were just beginning, and the story happened to be geared to the age group that first embraced the online world). To be honest, I didn’t want to spend that much effort on what is really just a way for me to pass mental time. (Physical time, too, but I like having something to occupy my mind, more than the issues of the day or . . . whatever.) Besides, however much I determine that upon this rereading, for sure, I will read every word, I never do. I find myself skimming or even skipping the characters I find annoying and the parts that include too much torture, both mental and physical.

I make sure, however, that I never skim or skip some of the most lyrical of Jordan’s writing. At one point, a character got lost in thoughts of the past, remembering that “They danced beneath the great crystal dome at the court of Shaemal, when all the world envied Coremanda’s splendor and might.” That’s pretty much all we ever find out about the lost nation of Coremanda, but that one sentence is haunting, conjuring in just a few words a long-forgotten time.

And then there’s a song that the same character remembers from long ago, a song that seems to be a theme of the books (NB: the Aes Sedai are the women power wielders):

Give me your trust, said the Aes Sedai.
On my shoulders I support the sky.
Trust me to know and to do what is best,
And I will take care of the rest.
But trust is the color of a dark seed growing.
Trust is the color of a heart’s blood flowing.
Trust is the color of a soul’s last breath.
Trust is the color of death.

Anyway, that lyricism is beside the point . . . actually, no — it’s not beside the point, it is the point of my rereading the books. It’s just not the point of this blog post and my feeling I should apologize for dumping my thoughts on the books here.

So, if you want an apology, you got it, but it’s not truly an apology because a sincere apology connotes a promise of not repeating the offense, and perhaps unfortunately for you, I will continue posting my thoughts until I’ve finished this reread or until I’ve given up blogging again.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.