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« on: April 15, 2007, 11:53:07 PM »
Your apartment and Waterloo would have the same decorator.
I think Sarah is not all-knowing or all-powerful, but she can observe everything that everyone is doing, without having to appear. She sees all, being a ghost, but doesn't understand very much of it, being an eight-year-old girl. She has probably gotten to know everyone at the estate in her own limited way.
I was disappointed with how the time-travel methods became more preposterous as they kept going back to 1795. Sarah's seance seems far-fetched, but it was solid compared to [spoiler]ex-vampires and college professors just doing it by force of will, whatever that means. Or profs telling others to do it that way. Witches, okay, I guess. Or slingshotting around the Sun. In a space coffin.[/spoiler]
I've been thinking about Sarah, and how we get to think about what childhood is, watching her. She's perpetually 8, but old, dealing with large mystifying issues problems and phenomena.... she gets as much of a handle on it as she can, but her understanding can never grow because she's stuck at 8.... she doesn't quite understand what she is or why the grownups went away, after 175 years.... she knows right and wrong and is powerful but naive...
That eternal unchanging incorruptible innocence coming back to confront the gnarled bitter murderous maniac Barnabas is, is one of the most important things about DS. It's not just extremely touching; it's what we all must struggle with (consciously or unconsciously), put in extreme terms, so we can see it sharply and clearly.
We're not all fiends, but we all drift in a certain direction after years of what we like to think is personal evolution but which is often conditioning and unintentional cynicism from a job routine, moral compromises we get used to and have to rationalize; we alter our expectations of ourselves with time.... what if our child self were to turn up one day when we're fifty or sixty, and we found he/she had purer morals or qualities we didn't realize we'd lost? All the decades would seem to collapse, and we'd be shocked and aware of all the moral drift over a lifetime.
I'm thinking of a story I left off on in 2000, and if I could figure this out I could put something about a child character into it, based on what Sarah gets me thinking about. If only I didn't have new carpet fumes in the building giving me nervous system disfunction, and if I could only sleep... my brain might start getting it done.