Ecstasy, April 22, and June 6

Just a note to self on some recent synchronicities.

On January 2, I was hiking with my wife, and she happened to ask me about the meaning of the English word ecstasy, which is the name of a popular clothing brand in Taiwan (and maybe elsewhere, too, for all I know). I explained. Hours later, we were in the car, listening to jazz on the radio, and one of the songs had the word ecstasy in the lyrics. "Hey, did she just say ecstasy?" my wife said. "That's quite a coincidence!"

Then I realized that just the day before, January 1, I had reread Whitley Strieber's little book The Key, of which ecstasy is one of the major themes. Doing a word search on the Kindle edition, I find that the word occurs 40 times in what is, in print, a 105-page book.

Also on January 1, I posted "Softly now," in which I mention twice encountering the date April 22 by chance; and "How the Nazis changed the future, according to The Key," in which I note in passing that the encounter described in that book had taken place on June 6, and that this was part of a theme of emphasizing the number six.

Today, January 3, I picked up Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, which I have been reading very slowly for over a year now, dipping into it from time to time when the spirit moves me. I only read a few pages today, but on those pages:

• Joan asks the narrator when she first began speaking of a wound that she was fated to sustain in the future. He replies, "Your Excellency spoke of it first to the King, in Chinon; that was as much as seven weeks ago. You spoke of it again the 20th of April, and also the 22d, two weeks ago, as I see by my record here."
• Joan speaks of her Voices saying to her, "Go forward, Daughter of God, and I will help thee," and says, "When I hear that, the joy in my heart, oh, it is insupportable!" The narrator adds, "The Bastard [of Orleans] said that when she said these words her face lit up as with a flame, and she was like one in an ecstasy."
• Joan has to muster an army on very short notice. The narrator writes, "A deal of the month of May had been wasted; and yet by the 6th of June Joan had swept together a new army and was ready to march."

I note that the other date mentioned in what I have quoted, April 20, is the birthday of Adolf Hitler, which syncs with the Nazi theme.

We'll see if anything further develops from these syncs. I post them here in case any of my readers can supply a missing puzzle piece or two.

Joan and the fairies

Of all the many works on Joan of Arc that are available, the one I felt moved to download was Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. I have already discussed the frontispiece and quoted from the preface, but that's about as far as I got until today.

It turns out that the first episode involving Joan herself -- the one Twain chooses to give us our first impressions and to establish the character of his heroine -- involves the young Joan taking the side of the local fairies against a priest who has just performed a ceremony to banish them.

"Then the matter stands like this. They were banned creatures, of fearful origin; they could be dangerous company for the children. Now give me a rational reason, dear, if you can think of any, why you call it a wrong to drive them into banishment, and why you would have saved them from it. In a word, what loss have you suffered by it?"

How stupid of him to go and throw his case away like that! I could have boxed his ears for vexation if he had been a boy. He was going along all right until he ruined everything by winding up in that foolish and fatal way. What had she lost by it! Was he never going to find out what kind of a child Joan of Arc was? Was he never going to learn that things which merely concerned her own gain or loss she cared nothing about? Could he never get the simple fact into his head that the sure way and the only way to rouse her up and set her on fire was to show her where some other person was going to suffer wrong or hurt or loss? Why, he had gone and set a trap for himself -- that was all he had accomplished.

The minute those words were out of his mouth her temper was up, the indignant tears rose in her eyes, and she burst out on him with an energy and passion which astonished him, but didn't astonish me, for I knew he had fired a mine when he touched off his ill-chosen climax.

"Oh, father, how can you talk like that? Who owns France?"

"God and the King."

"Not Satan?"

"Satan, my child? This is the footstool of the Most High -- Satan owns no handful of its soil."

"Then who gave those poor creatures their home? God. Who protected them in it all those centuries? God. Who allowed them to dance and play there all those centuries and found no fault with it? God. Who disapproved of God's approval and put a threat upon them? A man. Who caught them again in harmless sports that God allowed and a man forbade, and carried out that threat, and drove the poor things away from the home the good God gave them in His mercy and His pity, and sent down His rain and dew and sunshine upon it five hundred years in token of His peace? It was their home -- theirs, by the grace of God and His good heart, and no man had a right to rob them of it. And they were the gentlest, truest friends that children ever had, and did them sweet and loving service all these five long centuries, and never any hurt or harm; and the children loved them, and now they mourn for them, and there is no healing for their grief. And what had the children done that they should suffer this cruel stroke? The poor fairies could have been dangerous company for the children? Yes, but never had been; and could is no argument. Kinsmen of the Fiend? What of it? Kinsmen of the Fiend have rights, and these had; and children have rights, and these had; and if I had been there I would have spoken -- I would have begged for the children and the fiends, and stayed your hand and saved them all. But now -- oh, now, all is lost; everything is lost, and there is no help more!"

Then she finished with a blast at that idea that fairy kinsmen of the Fiend ought to be shunned and denied human sympathy and friendship because salvation was barred against them. She said that for that very reason people ought to pity them, and do every humane and loving thing they could to make them forget the hard fate that had been put upon them by accident of birth and no fault of their own. "Poor little creatures!" she said. "What can a person's heart be made of that can pity a Christian's child and yet can't pity a devil's child, that a thousand times more needs it!"

She had torn loose from Pere Fronte, and was crying, with her knuckles in her eyes, and stamping her small feet in a fury; and now she burst out of the place and was gone before we could gather our senses together out of this storm of words and this whirlwind of passion.

The Pere had got upon his feet, toward the last, and now he stood there passing his hand back and forth across his forehead like a person who is dazed and troubled; then he turned and wandered toward the door of his little workroom, and as he passed through it I heard him murmur sorrowfully:

"Ah, me, poor children, poor fiends, they have rights, and she said true -- I never thought of that. God forgive me, I am to blame."

Of course I realize that this is a work of fiction not necessarily reflecting anything about the real Joan, but it still struck me. My post "Can you just choose a patron saint?" begins and ends with fairies, and indeed my experience of Joan's presence was accompanied by a strong sense that the term "synchronicity fairies" was after all pretty close to being literally accurate -- that most of the synchronicities I experience are neither "naturally occurring" nor divine interventions, but are the work of, as I put it, "good people, not exactly human."

Although I didn't mention it at the time, I also had a strong sense that there is some special relationship between Joan and the fairies -- "like Snow White and the seven dwarfs" is the somewhat absurd expression that presented itself to my mind.

In my "patron saint" post I relate how I had literally told the sync fairies to "take a hike" and how my encounter with Joan then caused a change of heart -- a remarkably close parallel to what happens to Pere Fronte in Twain's novel. I again stress that, although I quote Twain's preface in that post, I had not yet read any other part of the book.

Can you just choose a patron saint?

Kat Valentine, Joan of Arc

I'm a Mormon. I don't know how this stuff works. Not that I've ever been much of a stickler for playing Christianity by the rules.

I've been a bit hard on the synchronicity fairies of late, resenting the way they've commandeered my blog for their political rannygazoo. Through it all I've never questioned their basic goodness, though, and now they've more than compensated me for my troubles by introducing me to one of the most perfect human beings that ever lived. All is forgiven.

I've been reading up a bit on Joan, trying to enter her world -- and then she unexpectedly entered mine. Twice today I've felt her presence around me so powerfully that I was reduced to uncontrollable tears (and I'm the kind of person who cries a few times a decade, if that). I believe she has taken an interest in us mortals now, in our darkest hour, and has begun working behind the scenes. God knows we need her.

Mark Twain captures her essence beautifully:

[T]he character of Joan of Arc is unique. It can be measured by the standards of all times without misgiving or apprehension as to the result. Judged by any of them, it is still flawless, it is still ideally perfect; it still occupies the loftiest place possible to human attainment, a loftier one than has been reached by any other mere mortal.

When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.

She was perhaps the only entirely unselfish person whose name has a place in profane history. No vestige or suggestion of self-seeking can be found in any word or deed of hers. . . . And for all reward, the French King, whom she had crowned, stood supine and indifferent, while French priests took the noble child, the most innocent, the most lovely, the most adorable the ages have produced, and burned her alive at the stake.

A saint for our time, in other words.

So this January 6, Epiphany, when you are celebrating the coming of the Magicians to Jesus Christ -- or, more likely, being distracted by the showdown in Washington -- take a moment to remember Jehanne of Domrémy. Not her death, which is remembered on May 30, but the miracle of her birth -- the birth of a pure soul into a brutal, wicked, rotten world. There is always hope.

By the way, some of my readers have expressed the opinion that my "synchronicity fairies" are God. They are not. They're just people; good people, not exactly human I think, but in the end just people. Once you've experienced the presence of someone genuinely divine, the difference is unmistakable. Fairies are fairies, angels are angels, gods are gods.

Maid of Heaven, pray for us!

"Two-hit wonders" quantified

An author is a "two-hit wonder" to the extent that there is a small difference in popularity between the most and second-most popular of his works, and a large difference between the second and the third. Thus, if a, b, and c are numbers representing the popularity of an author's three most popular works, then the greater the value of b²/ac, the more of a "two-hit wonder" that author is.

The values for a, b, and c can be acquired by checking the author page on LibraryThing, which lists how many copies of each book are owned by members of that site. (This is easier than checking Amazon, because LT combines the various editions of each book.)

Take George Orwell, for instance, as a pretty clear example of a two-hit wonder. His top three works on LT are 1984 (64,964), Animal Farm (46,341 copies), and Down and Out in Paris and London (6,378). There are also 2,625 copies of books that combine Animal Farm and 1984 in a single volume, so:

• a (1984) = 64,964 + 2,625 = 67,589
• b (Animal Farm) = 46,341 + 2,625 = 48,966
• c (Down and Out) = 6,378
• b²/ac = 5.56

For comparison, Herman Melville is an obvious example of a one-hit wonder.

• a (Moby-Dick) = 27,517
• b (Bartelby) = 2,121
• c (Billy Budd) = 2,094
• b²/ac = 0.08

Charles Dickens wrote a large number of popular books.

• a (Great Expectations) = 30,222
• b (A Tale of Two Cities) = 28,643
• c (Oliver Twist) = 18,408
• b²/ac = 1.47

Now that the metric is established, and has been shown by a few examples to give reasonable results, we can try to determine which English-language authors are the greatest two-hit wonders. This post was inspired by a post by Bruce Charlton called "Tolkien - the only 'Two Hit Wonder'?" -- so let's look at Tolkien first. Tolkien's case is complicated somewhat by the fact that The Lord of the Rings, a single novel, is very often sold in three volumes, so to get the number I took the total number of one-volume copies, divided the numbers for Fellowship, Towers, and Return by three, and added them all together. The result is:

• The Lord of the Rings = 87,087
• The Hobbit = 80,389
• The Silmarillion = 26,894
• b²/ac = 2.76

So Tolkien is indeed a two-hit wonder to some extent, but to nowhere near the same degree as Orwell. (This result surprised me a bit. I had underestimated the popularity of The Silmarillion.)

Here, then, is a ranked list of some two-hit wonders (score at least 2).

• Anne Brontë = 22.73 (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Agnes Grey)
• Samuel Butler = 14.93 (The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon)
• Lewis Carroll = 11.39 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass)
• Barack Obama = 10.58 (The Audacity of Hope, Dreams from My Father)*
• Samuel Richardson = 9.38 (Pamela, Clarissa)
• Wilkie Collins = 6.26 (The Woman in White, The Moonstone)
• George Orwell = 5.56 (1984, Animal Farm)
• Richard Wright = 4.74 (Native Son, Black Boy)
• Thornton Wilder = 4.48 (Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey)
• Jack London = 2.88 (The Call of the Wild, White Fang)
• J. R. R. Tolkien = 2.76 (The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit)
• Henry Fielding = 2.60 (Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews)
• Mark Twain = 2.08 (Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer)
• Rider Haggard = 2.01 (King Solomon's Mines, She)

So far these are the only ones we (I and various commenters here and on Bruce's original post) have found. (Poets and playwrights have proved hard to analyze, as it is so common for several different works to be sold together in one volume, so I have mostly limited this to novels.)  Feel free to add more in the comments.

* Apparently Bill Ayers has repeatedly claimed to be the real author of Dreams of My Father but not of The Audacity of Hope. If that's true (goodthinkers say he's just joking), then of course Obama doesn't count as a two-hit wonder.