Sophie's World 1: The Phantom Menace's Birthday Card

M'kay, so the first chapter of Sophie's World (In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. Or it might have been The Garden of Eden. I don't really remember the name. From now on, I'll just try to be close to the chapter names) raised two questions: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" It also introduced the Hilde arc (a mismailed birthday card! BIGGEST MYSTERY EVAR!), which will hopefully get explored later in the book. Otherwise it's just a dangling plot thread, and I'm wrong in calling it an arc. It would also mean this could be a book of Kudzu plots, which would suck.

The point of these questions is to launch Sophie into a philosophical spiral (she starts wondering if she'd been given a different name, would she have become a different person, and if everything must come from something, then the question of how everything came to be is a question that keeps looping back, because God wouldn't be able to create himself before he existed). That spiral then sends her into a loop of thinking about how great life is, which makes her think about how much death sucks, which made her think about how great life is, which makes her think about how much death sucks, repeat ad infinitum...

Once she snaps out of that endless thought train (okay, so she didn't quite repeated to infinity), she then figures that she has three problems to solve:

1. Who sent her the letters?
2. What are the answers to the questions on her mind?
3. Who is Hilde*?

The next day (in Chapter 2, Rise of the Planet of the Top Hats), Sophie's friend Joanna gets actual dialog, which I think is a real shame. Apparently, Black Jack and badminton are just the bee's knees, and when Sophie disagrees, Joanna responds by getting angry and storming off to her house, leaving Sophie to wander home in the dangerous roads of Norway (according to the Pirate Bay, polar bears roam the streets of Sweden, attacking people. Norway borders on Sweden, so I assume there's some spill over. Unless the Norwegians have some awesome military unit that patrols the streets, killing any murderous polar bears. But I've never heard of such a unit, so I have to assume there is no such unit), all by herself. Despite the wishes of Joanna, the worst friend a person could ask for, Sophie makes it home safe, and finds another letter. This letter (which basically serves as an introduction to Philosophy) somehow knew that Sophie's philosophical spiral involved the existence of God and whether or not there was life after death, and declares that philosophers climb rabbit hair (so they might stare into the face of God) for a hobby. After reading this (and forgetting to breathe for a little while), she goes to check her mail box again. She finds another letter, which declares that housewives consider indoor flight to be quite improper, but don't mind the idea of men climbing rabbit hair so they might stare into the face of God whilst shouting that we're floating in space (which I'm sure could be tied to the idea that we're all just dust in the wind).

It turns out that this is a metaphor, and the whole of reality is not just some rabbit being pulled from a celestial top hat (anyone who has read some of Terry Pratchett's work knows that the Universe is actually just the contents of a leather bag carried by an old man as he journeys through space** ***). The idea of the metaphor is that when we're born, we're at the tip of the hairs, and everything is vast and new and wonderful. As we age, we climb down the hairs, nestling in the mess of hairs, getting comfy and complacent. Unless you're a philosopher! Then at some point you drag yourself out of that boring, humdrum life and reclimb the hairs, to stare a new at the vast and wonderful world [of stage magic].

So, through the ancient practices of reading and not breathing, Sophie learns how to piss off her mother, and thus realizes she has been saved from a comfy, complacent life.

:BLACKOUT:


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*Sophie's logic is that if one weird thing happened around the same time as another weird thing, the two events must be related. Horrible logic, but it sets the plot ball in motion, so whatever.
**there is debate as to whether or not the leather bag and the old man are also inside the leather bag that carries the universe.
***also worth note that the world is carried on the backs of four elephants, who are standing on the back of a giant space turtle that journeys through space.