Category: Books

Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality appeared in the Season 5 episode of Lost: “He’s Our You.” It’s the second book in Castaneda’s allegedly nonfiction series that begins with The Teachings of Don Juan. I actually own this book, though I had never read it. I picked it up at a garage sale in a volume that also contains the first book and the fourth, Tales of Power. Why the 3rd isn’t included, I don’t know.

I read The Teachings back when I got the book in the mid-’90s, and while it was interesting, I never intended to keep reading. The books are about Castaneda’s supposed apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matus. The Teachings of Don Juan was Castenada’s grad school thesis in anthropology, though many now believe he made up the whole thing.

A Separate Reality tells of Castaneda’s second apprenticeship in which he attempts to learn to “see” the world as “a man of knowledge” does. Seeing is more than looking. It is a heightened perception that allows the warrior or the sorcerer to truly know the world as well as perform seeming impossible acts. Being a rational and scientific-minded man, Castaneda finds this to be quite difficult, though he does make some progress on his journey.

Ultimately, it is about the need to shed a hyperrational world view in order to come to terms with the mystical/spiritual side of our nature.

This, of course, is the story of Lost.

The tension between the rational physician Jack Shepard and the spiritual seeker John Locke drives more of Lost‘s plotlines than any other conflict on the show. In Season 5, we see Jack beginning to shed some of his rationalism and begin to have faith in the island and his destiny. Jack is, like Castaneda, a long way from becoming a man of knowledge in the mystical sense, but with Locke seemingly dead/evil/possessed, I suspect Jack’s ability to reconcile the opposing forces of reason and faith will decide the fate of the island.

The book is passed to an imprisoned Sayid by a young Ben Linus in “He’s Our You.” It seems appropriate that a book that deals extensively with the shamanistic use of psychotropic plants should appear in the episode in which Sayid is made to “talk” by being fed psychedelics. It also calls to mind Locke’s use of island psychedelics in Season 1 and Season 3. Both times, he partakes in order to commune with the island.

Through most of Lost, we are meant to see Locke as a man on a quest to become that man of knowledge. This makes it particularly interesting that it is Ben Linus who is the book’s owner. I suspect Ben sees more than we think and may even be more of a man of knowledge than Locke or anyone else suspects.

I have no great theories at this point, but there is a quote worth noting from A Separate Reality:

The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!

Toward the end of the book, don Juan goes on to emphasize that one must break free of the prison of reason to become a man of knowledge. Trying to understand only prevents true seeing.

I suspect we’ll never really understand everything we want to know about the island, and quite frankly, that’s okay with me.

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This will be my last Lost Book Club post until January when the 6th and final season commences. I am caught up with the exception of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge, which appeared in the season finale. I’ll read that and report back as I gear up for the Lost season premiere in January.

Check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts. I’ve read all 37 of the books references or shown on the show with the exception of the O’Connor book. It’s an amazing list too.

And for the best theorizing around, check out these two excellent Lost blogs and their analyses of the end of Season 5:

Lost… and Gone Forever

EYE M SICK (which also has a cool 3 sentence theory challenge)

For a while, I thought it odd that no books had been shown or mentioned in season 5 of Lost. Then, a doozy appeared when we saw Ben Linus reading James Joyce’s Ulysses in the episode “316.” I enjoyed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the stories I’d read in Dubliners so I gave it a read. Woof.

Ulysses is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set on a single day in Dublin in 1904. Leopold Bloom travels the streets, going about his business, all the while worrying about an affair that his estranged wife may be having at 4:00. Intersecting Bloom’s path is Stephen Dedalus, a young poet whose father is an acquaintance of Bloom’s.

The genius of Ulysses lies not in the story but in the telling. Joyce delves deeper into the consciousnesses of his characters than any other writer I’ve read. At times it seems as though his intent is to record every stray thought that passes through their heads, a technique that sometimes leads to tedium and sometimes the most powerful of insights.

Each chapter is presented in a different style, thus creating slightly different perspectives from which to view Leopold and Stephen. Additionally, each chapter is meant to suggest certain events in Odysseus’ journey back to Ithaca, which Joyce accomplishes at the symbolic level.

By the end of the book, Leopold returns from his wanderings and, though she has had an affair, reclaims his wife from “the suitors.” It’s nothing like Odysseus reclaiming Penelope from her suitors. It’s much more ambiguous and anticlimactic, but therein lies Joyce’s genius.

I admit that this is only the most cursory and superficial rundown of a truly deep book, but it’s not something I can thoroughly describe in a short post where the point is to figure out what it has to do with Lost.

Once again, Lost has led me to great literature and a book I might not otherwise have read. It’s a complicated book, but a joy to read. It’s one of those that throughout reading, I kept wondering, “This is genius. How does a person think to write a book like this?”

My wife suggested absinthe.

On to Lost.

Season 5 is mainly about the return of Ben Linus and the Oceanic Six to the island. It is a long journey full of twists and turns and as with Penelope in Ithaca, the island has many suitors. The question we should be asking about Lost is which of the suitors is the rightful heir to the island: Ben? Locke? The “Shadow of the Statue” people? Alpert? Jacob? Jack? Christian?

It’s easy to assume Ben is the bad guy, but Ulysses reminds us that it is our perspective on events that allows us to make that judgment, and we still do not have a full and detailed perspective on all of the characters. I am inclined to think that Ben is the true heir and though he has been humbled and ordered to obey Locke, this may only be a temporary state and possibly one that is necessary for him to return just as Odysseus had to disguise himself as a beggar and Leopold had to sneak into his house in the dark of night.

Other than that and the fact that Ulysses, like Lost, is full characters with father and fatherhood issues, I don’t have much. Lost has reached a point where the game of analysis has changed. There was a time when analyzing Lost meant trying to understand what was really going on. Now we pretty much know. It’s a time travel show, which I predicted a few seasons ago. The question, now that there aren’t really all that many more questions, is what is going to happen? How will this all play out?

Rather than trying to figure out the island, we are left with trying to predict the choices the characters will make. Lost is truly a story moving toward its climax, which will happen next year in its sixth and final season. The presence of Ulysses suggests that “Ulysses” will return to “Ithaca” and reclaim it by vanquishing the suitors. The question is, who is Ulysses? It’s probably Locke, but I won’t be surprised if it’s Ben. Perhaps the only time he ever told the truth was the moment in the season 2 finale when Michael asked who the Others were, and Ben responded, “We’re the good guys.”

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Lostpedia had some good stuff about Ulysses and how it pertains to Lost. From Lostpedia:

A quote from page 316 of the novel is also hidden in the source code of the Ajira Airways website. The final chapter is named “Penelope”. Fionnula Flanagan who plays Mrs. Hawking is famous for the role of Molly Bloom (a character in the book) in stage and film, including “James Joyce’s Women” and “Joyce to the World.”

More pertinently, the reference to Ulysses fronts the father-son relationships in the episode and series. In the novel, Leopold Bloom longs to be a father-figure to a son, while Stephen Dedalus struggles with his own identity as son. The events recorded in Ulysses trace Bloom and Dedalus’ wanderings around Dublin as they miss each other, cross paths, cross thoughts, and finally meet before parting. In “Ithaca,” the seventeenth chapter, the narrating voice refers to the shift between the two characters’ thoughts and perspectives as a sort of parallax, an appropriate model for the differences between the perspectives of Lost‘s main characters (as well as a handy hint concerning the Island’s physics?).

Ben’s pithy comment (while browsing James Joyce’s Ulysses) regarding his mother teaching him to read is Ironic, as both he and the Joycean Ulysses character Stephen Dedalus have issues of guilt over the deaths of their respective mothers despite Ben’s mother having died in Childbirth & Dedalus’ much later in life.

Also, the fact that Ulysses is built upon Homer’s Odyssey should cue the viewer into certain observations. First, the events of ‘316’ are a re-telling, a re-enacting of earlier events. Second, the viewer is left to wonder whether the Oceanic Six are (finally) returning to the Island as Odysseus returns to Ithaca or just on another leg of their voyage.

I must admit, I doff my hat to whoever is going through and reading the code for the various Lost websites in order to find clues. I thought I was hard core just for reading the books.

Check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts.

Next up, A Separate Reality by Carlos Castenada.

The last unread book from Season 4 of Lost was The Survivors of the Chancellor by Jules Verne. I had not previously read any of Verne’s work, and after reading this, I consider that my loss. I’ll have to investigate some of his more famous works like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Around the World in 80 Days.

Published in 1875, The Survivors of the Chancellor recounts the ordeal of a group of people who survive the burning and slow sinking of their ship, a freighter called The Chancellor. They must endure almost 2 months aboard a raft as their food and water dwindle and the remnants of the crew begin to turn against the passengers and one another. Verne’s story takes the reader through many of the classic perils of life on the sea: fire, storms, mutiny, murder, suicide, doldrums, and even to the drawing of lots to determine which of the survivors must be sacrificed and eaten.

It’s a short, brisk read, and thoroughly entertaining.

As to Lost, it appears in the Season 4 episode “Ji Yeon.” It is the book Regina is reading (upside down) moments before she goes on deck and takes her own life. Had I read it or known the book last year, I might have been able to offer predictions about the future of the freighter: that it was doomed, that few would survive, and that there would be a mutiny.

A year later, The Survivors of the Chancellor sheds no new light on Lost. Still, it was a worthwhile read, and a perfect book for Regina to read considering the hopelessness that had begun to take root on board the Lost freighter.

There haven’t been many books in Season 5 yet, but I am working on Ulysses by James Joyce, which is, so far, the only identifiable book from this season. The book Sawyer was reading in “Namaste” remains in shadow as if we are not to know the book. Or perhaps, there was a production error, and he is reading something that had not yet been published in 1978.

Check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts.

Season 5 of Lost has been light on literature. I haven’t seen any books featured in the episodes, and only one has been clearly referenced: The Little Prince by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I must admit, I miss the heady days of Seasons 2 and 3 with the hatch library and the book club meetings over in New Otherton. I’ll take what I can get, though, and I like what I got.

A children’s book, Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince is a wonderfully created fable about love and friendship, and how once a thing or a person has been loved, it becomes unique in all the world to the one who loved it.

The story begins in the Sahara Desert where the narrator just survived a plane crash (an incident based on a real event in Saint-Exupéry’s life) and is approached by a young prince from the small asteroid B612. The narrator befriends the prince who tells him of his home and his travels.

Asteroid B612 is a small place with 3 volcanoes and a single rose that the prince loves dearly. The rose plays games with him, however, and he decides to leave and see the rest of the universe. His travels take him to other asteroids where he meets various adults who don’t understand or value what is important about life.

Eventually he finds his way to Earth where he meets a fox who teaches him about love and the way love makes the beloved unique in all the world. The fox tells him the great secret:

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

The prince meets other roses, but because he does not love them, they are just roses. Eventually, coming to understand how much he loves his rose for its unique and special nature, he desires to return home.

His wish to go home is what has brought him back to the Sahara and in search of a snake who tells him that one bite will take him home. The prince tells the narrator not to be sad, that it must be this way because his body is too heavy to go back to his asteroid and so he must allow the snake to bite him so he can leave it behind and travel home.

The snake bites the prince and the next day, the narrator awakens to find that the prince has gone.

Despite the prince’s apparent death, the narrator takes comfort in knowing that the prince is still out there and that he has returned home to protect his rose.

It’s a beautiful story with lots of interesting ambiguity. I will definitely be checking out more of Saint-Exupéry’s work.

It is also the story of John Locke.

Ever since the end of Season 4, we have known that Locke must die in order to save the island. He probably has to die to return, and while we don’t yet know the exact mechanism for this, I think it’s clear from the title of the episode “The Little Prince,” John Locke will be coming back to life, and that he had to die to return home to the island he has come to love.

In case the reference in the title isn’t enough, the name Canton Rainier on of the side of Ben’s van, which first appears in this episode, can be rearranged to spell reincarnation.

John Locke, the little prince of the island, is coming back to life.

The reincarnation angle gets extra play with this week’s episode title “316.” I suspect it refers to the coordinates to get back to the island, but it is also a reference to John (not John Locke, though) 3:16:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

The Little Prince, then, is meant to hint at the reasons for Locke’s death, and while we don’t know the reason for its necessity, I believe it is another clear hint that Locke will be coming back in some form. I believe the island grants everlasting life. Just look at Richard Alpert. The question, then, is to whom is this gift granted. It doesn’t seem to have been granted to Ben Linus. And why does it seem to have been given to Christian Shepard?

All this everlasting life business ties into the theories I proposed last year after reading Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel, in which I argued that the island projects the dead. This is in fact why Alpert does not age and I suspect Locke will not age anymore once he returns to the island.

There was another interesting reference to The Little Prince in the name of the French crew’s boat: Besixdouze. That’s French for B612, the name of the little prince’s asteroid.

On a lighter note, Annie from The Transplantable Rose sent me a link to this clip some former Austinite friends of hers made when they traveled to Oahu. They visit some of the Lost sets and even reenact a few scenes:

Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost book posts at The Lost Book Club.

I guess it was only a matter of time before The Chronicles of Narnia would get a reference on Lost. In fact I guessed this in my post on A Brief History of Time:

… we’re left with A Brief History of Time, yet another book suggesting that the island may exist outside the normal time stream of the rest of the world. The other books that suggest this are: A Wrinkle in Time, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” The Wizard of Oz, The Third Policeman, and Alice in Wonderland. When The Chronicles of Narnia appears I think the deal will be sealed.

For those who may not know, The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis is a seven-book series about the history of an alternate world called Narnia. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair form the main cycle in the series and together recount the adventures of a group of children who come to Narnia to save it. They are called to return time and again throughout the series, and it is their faith in the other world and its mysteries that guides and protects them.

The Magician’s Nephew tells of Narnia’s origins, The Horse and His Boy is a story of faith in the face of travail, and The Last Battle takes the reader through Narnia’s end times.

Narnia itself is ruled by a benevolent godlike being named Aslan who takes the form of a lion. Faith in Aslan is what The Chronicles are all about.

The books are steeped in Christian thought and tradition, and some of them are direct allegories: Lion, Witch, Wardrobe is the Gospel, Magician’s Nephew is Genesis, and Last Battle is Revelation. For my money, The Magician’s Nephew is the best one.

How does all this connect with Lost? Only through a name. The books have not appeared, but Season 4 brought scientist Charlotte Staples Lewis (CS Lewis) to the island. I suppose we could consider this a reference to any of Lewis’s work, but Narnia seems like the best candidate.

The world of Narnia is like Lost island in many ways. Not the least of which is the fact that the island exists in a time stream apart from ours. I’m especially interested in the fact that Narnia’s time stream isn’t just out of phase with ours, it runs at different rates at different times. For instance 60 or so years go by in our world between Magician and Lion, Witch, Wardrobe, but untold thousands pass in Narnia. Then between Lion, Witch, Wardrobe and Caspian 2-3 years go by in our world, while thousands pass in Narnia. But between Caspian and Dawn Treader only a few years go by in both worlds.

Using the Narnia model for Lost island, we have a way for the outside world and the island to show no correlation between time streams. This gives the writers a lot of freedom as to how much time has gone by in the two places when the Oceanic 6 finally do return, as I suspect they must.

Other than the timestream issues, The Chronicles of Narnia make a nice reference because, as with Lost, a small group of believers find their faith tested and ultimately they will have to be the ones to return to the magical other place in order to save it. Will there be one who, like Susan in Narnia, refuses to believe in the things she has seen? If so, look for one of the Oceanic 6 to pass on returning, thus sealing his or her fate.

Narnia mainly serves as a potent reminder of the importance of faith in Lost. It can be lost, but the island will take a person back who regains his faith (John Locke blowing up the Hatch but coming to see the error of his ways), and sometimes one’s faith must lead to sacrifice (see Ben sacrificing his life on the island in order to save it when he moves the island at the end of Season 4). The question, then, is will Jack find sufficient faith to lead the Oceanic 6 back?

I suspect we’ll have a clearer picture of the Narnia connections in Season 5, which starts tonight. Something tells me The Chronicles of Narnia may join The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Watership Down as a source of recurring references on Lost.

I hope you’ll check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts.

Listen. Desmond Hume has come unstuck in time.

The phrase “unstuck in time” is the how Kurt Vonnegut described Billy Pilgrim’s condition in his classic antiwar novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim a young American GI serving on the German front in World War II, is taken prisoner by the Nazis. He spends most of the war living and working in a slaughterhouse (numbered 5) in Dresden where he becomes a firsthand witness to the Allied bombing in 1945, an event Vonnegut considered to be unnecessary to say the least.

But that’s not the whole story. Slaughterhouse-Five follows Billy’s life through his postwar years and even to the planet Tralfamador where he is taken to live in a zoo and breed with porn star Montana Wildhack. It’s a weird book, but brilliant too.

The events that take place in that slaughterhouse in Dresden are largely autobiographical. The parts of the story involving the Tralfamadorians… not so much.

Slaughterhouse-Five tackles many of the fate vs. free will themes with which Lost wrestles, all the while suggesting a universe is which all things are always happening simultaneously, thus allowing someone’s consciousness to ping-pong about in time, remembering the future and experiencing death, but not necessarily as the last moment of life.

The connection to Lost is made in “The Constant”, one of Lost‘s best episodes, when Farraday explains Desmond’s condition as being “unstuck in time.” Like Billy Pilgrim, Desmond’s body does not travel through time, only his consciousness does with the apparent result that he is able to remember pieces of the future.

I’ve said for some time that Lost is a show about time travel, and in the case of Desmond’s time travel (which is different from what Ben appears to do in the Season 4 finale) Slaughterhouse-Five provides a way of understanding what is happening to Desmond, as well as being a reminder that in the world of Lost, as in that of Billy Pilgrim, you (probably) can’t fight destiny.

More than anything, though, I suspect it is a nod from the writers of Lost to Vonnegut who had mined ground similar to Lost years before.

Poo-tee-weet?

Check out my other Lost book posts at The Lost Book Club.

With only 3 days left until the premeire of Lost Season 5, I guess it’s time to round up the remaining books in The Lost Book Club. Today, we’ll take a look at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

On the Road is Kerouac’s most well-known book and probably the most widely read work of the beat movement. It is largely autobiographical and tells the story of a number of road trips that Keroauc made with his friend, and sometimes nemesis, Neal Cassady across the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Kerouac narrates as Sal Paradise and invents names for his friends: Cassady becomes Dean Moriarty, Allen Ginsburg becomes Carlo Marx and William S Burroughs appears as Old Bull Lee.

It’s a wonderfully rambling book about seeking a greater something that eludes easy description but that could potentially be found in jazz, sex, marijuana, eastern religion, poetry, beauty, Mexico, the West, and just generally getting lost in the great American landscape. By the end, Sal is no longer certain he believes in the things he sought or that they are even attainable. It’s ultimately a tale of pursuing unattainable dreams, youthful idealism defeated by age and the unceasing encroachments of the “real world.”

I realize as I’m writing this that there are echoes of On The Road throughout Lost. The book itself does not appear, but it is referenced in the alias used by Ben Linus in “The Shape of Things to Come” and shown on his fake passport in “The Economist.” The alias is Dean Moriarty, described in On the Road as “the holy con-man with the shining mind.” If that’s not Ben Linus, I don’t know what is.

Ben’s first alias was Henry Gale (a reference to the wizard in The Wizard of Oz), a name that seemed appropriate for the mastermind behind the mysterious Others. As of Season 4, however, Ben is no longer in charge. He has lost his island and his home. He is a wanderer in an unfriendly world, and much like Kerouac’s anti-hero, Dean Moriarty, he is seemingly forever on the road. It is worth noting here, that by the end of Season 4, it is the character named Jack to whom Ben turns when he needs to return to the island, to go on the road, as it were seeking those elusive things that the island provides. I suspect Season 5 will be something of an on the road season.

It must be mentioned, especially in the context of Ben Linus, that the name Moriarty also suggests a certain character from Sherlock Holmes (via Lostpedia):

Alternatively, “Moriarty” evokes Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis and widely considered fiction’s first “supervillain,” creating the archetype of the brilliant criminal mastermind.

Brilliant criminal mastermind? That sounds like Ben Linus. Unless Ben really is the “good guy” as he has claimed since Season 2.

As I think about this, I can’t help but wonder if another Kerouac novel might show up sometime. Wouldn’t The Dharma Bums be a perfect addition to The Lost Book Club. It’s a better book than On the Road as well.

Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts.