The Butterfly Effect - How It All Began

ButterflyTangle - art journal piece:
acrylic, zentangle, fabric and vintage book scraps

Penelope Lively opens her novel How It All Began with a quote from James Gleick regarding the Butterfly Effect, how the flapping of a butterfly's wings in one place can impact the weather somewhere half way around the world. It was Edward Lorenz of MIT, who in 1961, while trying to come up with a way to model weather patterns using computers, discovered that it would be almost impossible to generate longterm forecasts because we are unable to measure precisely enough the factors that we input into the model.

But how does weather modeling come into Lively's story? It doesn't. What does is the opening event - the mugging of an elderly woman named Charlotte. That event creates a cascade through the small group of Lively's characters who don't even know that they are connected to one another. You know it's like meeting someone who it turns out knows so-and-so and before you know it they are your neighbor's third cousin twice removed.

Charlotte is a former Literature teacher and in retirement a literacy volunteer. The mugging has resulted not only in the loss of her purse, but an injury: a broken hip. While convalescing, she finds it hard to focus on the one thing that has always sustained her - reading. "Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even (p. 34)." How frustrating it must have been to her during this time not to have the solace that comes from reading. When my father was in the hospital and we were waiting a diagnosis, I knew that he was truly ill because after a lifetime of watching him reading, he didn't. He wasn't tempted by the daily paper, magazines or a book. When the diagnosis did come, Stage IV lung cancer, it was a swift five weeks to his passing.  I would not see him read again.

Like Charlotte, I read to learn about other cultures, what it is like to be a different age, have more or less money, how to overcome a broken heart, to be a brilliant scientist, an intrepid explorer, and the list goes on and on. "She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without (p. 35)." How beautifully put, of course I am who I am because of what I've experienced but also what I have read. The thoughts of others, whether I've encountered them in person or through a book, and like the beating of a butterfly's wings, have had some effect on me. In return we may never know how our lives and words may effect someone else somewhere half way around the world from us.