DREAMING A DREAM: INSPIRATION BEHIND FLIGHTS OF FANCY

Victor Hugo is one of my favourite authors.

He is regarded by many as one of the supreme poet of French romanticism, and is best known for today’s popular world classic: Les Misérables.

Everything Hugo writes in Les Misérables revolves around one central notion - that a universal moral order exists. That every one of us possesses a natural human goodness - the potential for compassion, courage and kindness - and that all things in the natural world are connected. One thing has an effect on another - the butterfly effect - the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a hurricane.

There is a particularly beautiful sentence in the book: " Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw" and this is was one of the inspirations behind the Flights of Fancy collection.

At 1400 pages, it's a bit of an investment so here is an excerpt of my favourite part. His insight is beautiful.

"Algebra applies to the clouds, the radiance of the star benefits the rose—no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand? Who can understand the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the echoing of causes in the abyss of being and the avalanches of creation? A mite has value; the small is great, the great is small. All is balanced in necessity; frightening vision for the mind. There are marvelous relations between beings and things, in this inexhaustible whole, from sun to grub, there is no scorn, each needs the other. Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird that flies has the thread of the infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a meteor and the tap of a swallow’s beak breaking the egg, and it guides the birth of the earthworm, and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has a greater view? Choose. A bit of mold is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an anthill of stars."

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (New York City: Penguin Books, 1982) pp. 764-65.]





See the Flights of Fancy collection here.