Imagine you are a child of eleven. You are reading a wondrous book, The Last Unicorn<\/i> by Peter S. Beagle.<\/p>\n
Following the adventures of Schmendrick the magician, you are at the climactic scene. He and his companions, one of whom is a woman named Molly Grue, are faced off against evil King Haggard, who has harnessed the evil power of a giant red bull (which is perhaps a demon) to kill the last unicorn on earth.<\/p>\n
It seems that all is lost, that the very last unicorn will tragically disappear from the world. And then something miraculous happens.<\/p>\n
Out of the ocean, thousands of unicorns stream ashore to join the battle against the evil king, like a vast wave of mystical salvation. Your eleven year old self is caught up in the wonder, the sheer majesty of this moment.<\/p>\n
And then, for one paragraph only, the book takes a strange little detour, before continuing on to its conclusion. This paragraph, your very first taste of metafiction, stays with you forever:<\/p>\n
\n“For Molly Grue, the world hung motionless in that glass moment. As though she were standing on a higher tower than King Haggard’s, she looked down on a pale paring of land where a toy man and woman stared with their knitted eyes at a clay bull and a tiny ivory unicorn. Abandoned playthings \u2013 there was another doll, too, half-buried; and a sandcastle with a stick king propped up in one tilted turret. The tide would take it all in a moment, and nothing would be left but the flaccid birds of the beach, hopping in circles.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine you are a child of eleven. You are reading a wondrous book, The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. Following the adventures of Schmendrick the magician, you are at the climactic scene. He and his companions, one of whom is a woman named Molly Grue, are faced off against evil King Haggard, who has … Continue reading “The world revealed as an illusion, part 3”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20985"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20985"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20987,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20985\/revisions\/20987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}