One of my favorite films is the Neverending Story, which led me to read the book (mostly the Mannheim translation, while dipping into the original German). Despite translation issues, the book is great, with a whole second half not covered by the film. I also realized that the movie was a masterpiece in adapting from one medium to another. A number of things were changed or left out, but always with good reason (pacing, narrative, and so forth).
One element that exists only in the book is the character of the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain, who is the complementary opposite to the Childlike Empress. More significantly (and to answer your query of where I'm going with this), he is the perfect chronicler! As it says in the dialogue, he writes down everything that happens, and everything he writes down, happens. Just as the Childlike Empress is the spark of inspiration, the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain completes the creative process by setting it down in corporeal, canonical form. Of course, not every detail is written down, but the idea is that the words capture everything that is meaningful to the story.
Of course, they live in what is essentially an astral realm of fantasy, where fictional stories take place, within a book that is meta-referential to the relation between reality and fantasy. Thus, the perfect chronicler can only exist in a fantasy world! In reality, chroniclers can chase after, but never quite capture, the "certain rapport" described by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, aka In Search of Lost Time (a book not even I've read, but that quote about an hour was a good one).
One of my favorite films is the Neverending Story, which led me to read the book (mostly the Mannheim translation, while dipping into the original German). Despite translation issues, the book is great, with a whole second half not covered by the film. I also realized that the movie was a masterpiece in adapting from one medium to another. A number of things were changed or left out, but always with good reason (pacing, narrative, and so forth).
One element that exists only in the book is the character of the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain, who is the complementary opposite to the Childlike Empress. More significantly (and to answer your query of where I'm going with this), he is the perfect chronicler! As it says in the dialogue, he writes down everything that happens, and everything he writes down, happens. Just as the Childlike Empress is the spark of inspiration, the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain completes the creative process by setting it down in corporeal, canonical form. Of course, not every detail is written down, but the idea is that the words capture everything that is meaningful to the story.
Of course, they live in what is essentially an astral realm of fantasy, where fictional stories take place, within a book that is meta-referential to the relation between reality and fantasy. Thus, the perfect chronicler can only exist in a fantasy world! In reality, chroniclers can chase after, but never quite capture, the "certain rapport" described by Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, aka In Search of Lost Time (a book not even I've read, but that quote about an hour was a good one).
The question of freewill is often binary, but it might be more interesting to ask if or when do we have, and who has it, and who never has it.