More words about context, in a different context.

The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr... Pretty great book. I can't help but admit that. But the context issues presented to me are just plain blowing my mind...

So we have this story of a cat--a rather intelligent cat at that--all written in the words of mankind. And, the story itself is written upon paper that also contains the story of Mr. Kreisler. So we have two stories. We readers could each as being in the context of the other, or we could find ourselves reading both as in context of a novel cunningly written with two plots intertwined (in the context of E.T.A. Hoffman's imagination, I'd imagine), but regardless of what's what, we can't avoid the fact that each plot has something to do with the other.

Now, I suppose I could read simply one of the plot-lines while ignoring the other. For instance, every time I see the letters "W.P." I could simply skip ahead to the next "M. Cont." and completely ignore the Kreisler story altogether. This is, I suppose, what bothers me most. Because now I'm stuck reading Tomcat in the context of ignoring half of Hoffman's work, thus making it only half of a Hoffman story, which suggests to me that doing this would take the story completely out of context, if you will.

So this is my lament. I'm beginning to understand the impermanence and flow of context from place to place as our thought can alter it. Constantly our entire understanding of the world is interrupted--be it by the ring of a fresh plurk, or by the interjection of some complicated words from Kreisler's biography into the story of an incredibly educated feline, or perhaps the sudden desire to post some blogged wisdom [I wish that to be pronounced "blog-ed wisdom," (here is an interruption within another parenthesized interruption)] in the midst of reading that very book, Tomcat.

The best part of all of this is that from a certain context, from many for that matter, these words would mean something, or anything completely different from the idea I'm trying to consider here. And how wonderful it is, that maybe I've written sense and nonsense ubiquitously and simultaneously, constantly and never, and yet it all means something to somebody somewhere, and changing from context to context to context like a ______(fill in blank with simile that would best fit the context).

-C.S.