Doyle to Dahl…
ROALD DAHL: Someone Like You
“I sat there and picked nuts out of the plate and munched them noisily, pretending that I did not care about anything, not even about making a noise while eating.”
This is possibly one of the most chilling stories I have ever read. It’s about jinking. I jinked a short while before reading it, those light touches of time deliberately sped up or wasted by delay, the opposite of Zeno’s Paradox, as I had another idea about the story above before I read this Dahl one, and now this story makes more sense than it otherwise would have done, and so does the previous one by Conan Doyle as a result.
It tells of a conversation in a restaurant that serves rotten whiskey.
A man who’d flown air raids in the war…
“‘You know,’ he said, ‘you know I keep thinking during a raid, when we are running over the target, just as we are going to release our bombs, I keep thinking to myself, Shall I just jink a little; shall I swerve a fraction to one side, then my bombs will fall on someone else. I keep thinking, Whom shall I make them fall on; whom shall I kill tonight? Which ten, twenty or a hundred people shall I kill tonight? It is all up to me. And now I think about this every time I go out.’”
And he tells me about another man called Stinker with a dog he loves so much he goes mad when it vanishes, and, now — as a result of the preternatural jinking (beyond reach of any jinx?) that I try to exercise when connecting the books that I happen by happenstance to read and real-time review simultaneously — a new slant is given to Missy the dog here earlier today… and the huge jealous sleek black cat, as created above in the previous story by Conan Doyle, is possibly even more loving than a dog, a dangerous-seeming cat that dotes on its hunting master and vice versa.
All three stories now have even more chilling power. With a Brazilian cat, a dog called Missy and Stinker’s dog called Smith.
Did Putin in our own time delay attacking Ukraine by a few seconds to avoid more deaths or create more deaths? The same or different deaths?
Think about it — Each time jinking before we do anything at all for fear of repercussions? This story could destroy a life ….because its reader (someone like you), as a result, may become freeze-framed? Hesitation piling on hesitation, by a new Zeno’s Paradox? Chilling, indeed.
Shall I mention the woman in this Dahl story with a beautiful bosom or the man with egg on his beard? Or do nothing?
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Full context of this review here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/26609-2/
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