Miscellanea: Evergreen "Ulysses" and Our Three Lives

 I sometimes clip out a newspaper or magazine article thinking I would like to write about a topic contained therein, but not immediately. More often that not, such clippings sit in a pile and eventually get thrown out.

One such article was "Tales of Female Trios" by Megan O'Grady in the Feb, 23, 2020 issue of T, the New York Times Style Magazine.

A couple things jumped out at me.

After discussing some of the books she read during her youth, such as "Little Women," Ms O'Grady said: "Meanwhile, the books my brother read were by and large structured as heroic journeys. Even his fantasy novels, with their large casts of characters, starred a lone adventurer overcoming great hardship to reach his goal."

In other words "Ulysses."  

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

At a later point in her article, Ms O'Grady, talked about the "rule of threes" she said occurs in much of Western literature. After noting Freud's division of the human persona into id, ego and superego, she said: "All of us have three characters within us: the one we display publicly, the one we actually are and the one we think we are."  That, she explained is a paraphrase of a notion put forward by 19th-century French critic Jean-Baptiste Alphones Karr.

Well, that brought to mind Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who said: “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

That, I think, makes more sense than Ms O'Grady's reading of Karr.

I shall now consign my copy of Ms O'Grady's article to the recycle bin, somewhat relieved that the act of saving it did not go totally to waste.