The Impossible Book

The Impossible Book

Literature serves to summarise the thoughts, aspirations and actions of mankind. Summarization can be manipulated to convey various (and often opposite) meanings to an event (action, thought, aspiration.) How can literature deal with summarization?

Take a man who lives for 65 years exactly. We can summarize that life with a single word, sentence, paragraph, book - a unit of description.
Now break this summary up e.g. into 65 units of description, with each unit representing a year in that persons life. Then break each year into 365 days, then each day into 24 hours , then each hour into 60 minutes, then each minute into 60 second, and so on until an infinite amount of divisions has been contemplated. It is when an author has reached the infinite division that their work is complete and the whole truth has been exposed. To achieve totality of information is impossible because we would need to know the details of events in infinitesmal time divisions first in order to accurately write about them - an impossibility. Therefore we need to make gross approximations and estimate a time when the divisions should stop.

Now, infinity can play a further role... Why should we limit our description to a single man's life? Why not the universe entire? A single word for the whole existence of the universe, subsequently broken down into smaller time divisions. This is another area for infinity (infinite subjects and infinite analytical divisions) If this was possible, the whole universe (in time and space) could be described. This notion adds to the suggestion that events in time and space diverge from a single point (the single unit of description), except this is independent of time.
In writing a book of this nature, the authors enter a world wherby the finite (a specific period of time) becomes infinite (an infinite number of divisions). Because literature is an application of the powers of summary, we must presume that the author begins at a point in which a series of events (e.g.a life) has already occured (i.e. the life has ended - it is in the past) thus the author has a complete picture, or an approximation of a complete picture, of an event before he writes. The first stage of the schemata is a single unit of description to summarize an infinite series of events. It is the authors task to deconstruct this summary into an ever-expanding description of events in an ever-decreasing time period. As he writes, the author would experience a change in direction of probability flow because time stands still. This idea is difficult to conceptualise without graphic demonstration.

1 descriptive unit = summary of events as a whole

65 descriptive units = split into years of a 65 year old mans life (arbitary)

1x65x365 descriptive units = broken up into days

1x65x365x24 descritpive units= broken up into hours, etc, etc

(N.B. The graphs below didn't work out after pasting them!!!!)



Time is still

--------------------------

I A Beginning of descriptive process (whole summary)

Prob I A A

I A A A A To infinity

I A A A A A A




I A

I A

I A A

I A A

Prob I A A

I A

I A

------------------------à Normal story flow / probability

Time ticks




N.B. Time = descriptive time/ novel time (not the real time of the author)

Prob = Probability flow (Normal story structure = probability flows with time

flow, Summarising form = probability flow independent of time flow)


The probability of a particular description being used by the author no longer depends upon time moving forwards (as is the case in the classic novel), it depends upon what content the author decides to give each subdivision (independent of time) and therefore has inverted. It can be concluded that the nature of descriptive probability would change because the events (unless stringently preconceptualized) occur randomly and independent of time. This offers the curious notion that the nature of probability is changed when time stops and suggests that time follows laws similar to those of acceleration (i.e. it is a vector) (i.e. it has magnitude and direction) (e.g. there is only + or 0 acceleration if direction is excluded. A negative acceleration indicates that forces are acting in the opposite direction to a moving body. If there was no direction there would be no -ve acceleration).