today's deep thought: time

[slinkling]

supacat got me thinking about Clark and maturity, and bop_radar has got me thinking about tragedy, and I'm seeing some overlap that I think I'll explore here. (Don't expect coherent conclusions, just an unpacking of stuff that's on my mind.)

supacat commented that, in my fic "I Shatter", Clark seems more mature than he does in the show. Which I thought about, and concluded that it's because the story is premised on Clark making a decision that deliberately moves him away from his childhood and into something new. Almost every decision he makes in canon is based on the principle of trying to preserve the conditions he grew up under: him and his parents living quietly on the farm, nobody (not even him) knowing his secret. Clark's ideal, his notion of what the world should be like, is that cozy world of his past; he rejects opportunities to get close to those he cares for, not because those people necessarily constitute a threat to him, but out of a kneejerk, "nobody knew my secret before, so nobody should know it now" reaction. (Sure, he has other reasons, but a lot of the time, I think this is what it boils down to.)

In literature, it's a common form of tragedy: you think you're headed for the future, but what you're trying to head for is an idealized vision of your past. Which doesn't exist anymore, so you wind up noplace at all. (The Great Gatsby, anyone?) I tend to think of it as a specifically American tragedy, since this country is so obsessed with always moving faster and faster into the future (Progress!) while we're stuck in a permanent nostalgia about our golden past (greatest generation, etc.), but I suppose it doesn't have to be. But that does make a certain sense to me: Clark Kent, all-American hero (true, he's an alien, but then, we're a country of immigrants), falling prey to the classic American tragedy.

In bop_radar's current essay on tragedy, she suggests that all 3 of SV's central characters -- Clark, Lex, and Lana -- are following an essentially tragic arc. Which fits with this too; Clark has criticized Lex in canon for being too obsessed with the past, and Lana's always trying to recreate the shiny happy way she felt with her parents before they got smooshed. Everybody's aiming for some soft-focus fantasy of what they believe they once had. But nobody actually had what they thought they had. Lana's parents weren't happily married, and her father isn't even really her father; Clark was never the normal boy he wanted to be, or even the freaky-but-still-human boy he thought he was. Lex's obsessive curiosity and Luthor upbringing were working under the surface to destroy his friendship with Clark, even when the two of them seemed closest.

Virginia Woolf came up with the image of time as a glassy lake: we float on the surface of the present, but underneath that surface is all of the past, forming the mass that holds us up. We can dip a hand into the water, to pull up a bit of the past for examination, but that's all. This image comes back to me now; I'm not exactly sure how to tie it in, but it seems relevant to this somehow. (I did warn that I'd have no coherent conclusions.)