It never really ends, wandering. We daydream of the various and multiple possibilities that have been. We seek them to play God, to gain a certain semblance of certainty and control in our haphazard dull life; to feel interesting; to spice up whatever variants of our life. We conjure multiple worlds and parallel dimensions of what could be. I skirt around Romeo and Juliet and cry wolf at the superficiality of their romance (infatuation)? When I think of tragic love stories and romance, it is not the images of suicide and family bitterness that pains and tugs me but the tragedy of parallel lines, and lovers in parallel dimensions. I search for tragedy in science fiction because what could be more romantic and tragic than parallel lines, lovers stuck in multiple dimensions unable to meet?
The emotional appeal and catharsis of tragedy is in its mimesis of life and action. Or so as Aristotle says. I love(d) the idea of Shakespearean’s cosmic irony - the notion that fate toys with human hopes & expectations; indifferent to the individual lives of the men. When Doctor meets Rose at The End of The World, separated by a thin spatial-temporal wall, palm facing palm, heart syncing heart. Or when Murakami’s boy meets the 100% Perfect Girl in a perfect cherry blossomed falling day, failing to recognise her a decade later. Or when Platonic lovers transversed through different times and centuries to find their would-be half. That lamenting irony of believing themselves to be ideally fated such that even cruel Time and Fate could not tear the other. Well the joke is on them. Why throw away a gift and chance encounter in time to the hands of Fate?
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