Found: A Speculative Reading of Lost.

WITH COURSEWORK COMPLETED in Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Egyptology, Creative Writing, Ceramics, Behavioral Biology, and Archeology, it seems that I’ve created the perfect storm of over-education, thereby allowing me to figure out the ending to the show. This is not a joke. What Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry was to William Blake’s poetry, or John Irwin’s Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge was to William Faulkner’s oeuvre, I’m certain these posts will be to the popular television series Lost.

For instance, though some may be able to tell you that the clock from Lost (pictured above) resets to the Middle Egyptian verb “to cause death” by looking in the cloth-bolt section of Raymond Faulkner’s useful though rather basic Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, how many people would be able to tell you that this s-causative verb swd3, written with a stick-determinative at the end, adds the nuance, “to cause the death of one’s enemy/nemesis”, or would be able to provide a specific reference to this interpretation in the Wörterbuch der Aegyptischen Sprache (of Doom!) (IV Band, p. 78-81, for those who wish to examine this information more closely)? Or that the i comes before the e in hieroglyphs? Or that hieroglyph is, in fact, the correct noun form, not hieroglyphics? Not many, I can tell you that.

And if I knew all that about one silly, little Middle Egyptian s-causative verb, just imagine how much I know about Anubis and temples and mysterious vapors, not to even mention what they have to do with 4 8 15 16 23 42!

This post quite naturally leads to a series of meta-questions : Is there a significance to the inclusion of Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry in the list of books I mentioned in the first paragraph? Why is it the only book that’s hyperlinked? Further, does this hyperlinked mention have something to do with William Blake? Northrop Frye? An entity that is fearful and/or symmetric? And why did I choose to publish this post (quite obviously written well in advance of this evening’s episode) at 9:03, as indicated in the little time stamp one sees when one looks up and to the left? Why not at 9:00 on the dot? Or 9:04? Or tomorrow morning? Or not at all?

Such questions and meta-questions (and meta-meta-questions, if you want to go there, which you don’t) could haunt a man till his dying day! If only somebody knew the answers to them!! Oh, right… me.

And so, in my own time and given the correct site-metric numbers, I’ll provide a speculative reading of the popular television show—the word speculative being academic-speak for, “I am undoubtedly correct.” (I always knew that the overabundance of esoteric degrees would come in handy one day!)