She.

For some days now I've been reading the works of Rider Haggard; his stories are the prototype for the more recent Indiana Jones movie epics.

Rip-roaring adventure is the name of the game; and English gentlemen, natives, big game animals, mysterious and generally evil shamans, and ancient undiscovered ruins all have their well defined place in the yarns. If only life were now, still, so clearly defined!

When these stories were written each had one common factor; each story depended on one key certainty which is that no reader could be absolutely certain that the story couldn't be, at least in part, possible.

I'm currently reading She, a story about a tribe and a country ruled by an Amazonian woman described by her citizens as 'she who must be obeyed'. At the time of telling few if any knew whether the swamps, rivers, rock formations, and the ancient ruined cities described in the story were real; when these stories were written it was still possible that some of Haggard's fictions could prove to be true.

There were still nearly a hundred years of exploration before we could be certain his fictions were just that. Wikipedia didn't exist and even though Encyclopaedia Britannica was in it's ninth edition, and there were plenty of detailed maps, vast tracts of land were still to be described and mapped. And the idea of Google Maps would have been considered as mystical as the pronouncements of the shamans in Haggard's stories.

Despite all this, perhaps because of it, by 1965 more than 85 million copies of She had been sold.

All this leads me to wonder about our world today where there is little room for mystery - especially in encyclopaedia texts, and on maps. We know there is nowhere on the planet ruled by an Amazonian woman. We know when most archeological sites were built, populated, and when they fell into ruin. We can be certain that Shamanism is just that. We know. We have the facts. There is no room for the doubt that gives rise to magical uncertainty, and the possibility there may be adventure in the unknown.

And has this knowing improved our literature? Our movies? Has this certainty added one whit of unpredictable adventurous possibility to our lives?

I meditate today on what adventure I could embark on that is not already entirely predictable. And I meditate on whether this lack of uncertainty isn't just a little stifling.

Toolkit:

http://www.amazon.com/She-H-Rider-Haggard-ebook/dp/B007JLCVSC/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1418181014&sr=1-4&keywords=She