Note: As part of the English major at Middlebury College, we had written and oral exams as part of Comps. I chose these passages from Tom toppard’s Arcadia. I don’t remember what I said, but I found some notes which I’ve included below.

Passage One

From Arcadia, (Act I, v), pages 47-48:

VALENTINE: If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there’d be a dot somewhere on the screen. You’d never know where to expect the next dot. But gradually you’d start to see this shape, because every dot will be inside the shape of this leaf. It wouldn’t be a leaf, it would be a mathematical object. But yes. The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It’s how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our lives, the things people write poetry about — clouds — daffodils — waterfalls — and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in — these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of the atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew was wrong.

Passage Two

Stanzas vi-ix of “God’s Funeral” (Hardy, Selected Poems, pages 84-85):

vi

“O man-projected Figure, of late Imagined as we, thy knell who shall survive? Whence came it we were tempted to create One whom we can no longer keep alive?

vii

Framing him jealous, fierce, at first, We gave him justice as the ages rolled, Will to bless those by circumstances accurst, And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

viii

And, tricked by our own early dream And need of solace, we grew self-deceived, Our making soon our maker did we deem, And what we had imagined we believed.

ix

Till, in Time’s stayless swing, Uncompromising rude reality Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning, Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.”

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Notes

Arcadia Oral!

Chaos is apparaently unpredictable behavior which arises ina deterministic system because of great sensitivity to initial condictions. Sensitivity in Arcadia is the porpensity to fall in love.

But, perhaps, if you filter out the noise of passion, such an equation might exist. Valentine, here, demonstrates that, in Arcadia, love

contrast valentine with septimus - a new beginning versus doomed end creation verus death hope: another cycle, another iteration

Valentine’s Passion

UNFOLD reveal, examine the mysteries, discovery “start see this shape”! unfoldind like Spetimus’ letters which reveal the drama

Nature and Art linked by process of solving a mystery representations/symbols

Future is disorder best possible time to be alivethoselove at sensitivity to initial condi art is another iteration of creation

first — is to recognize valentine’s passion

READ PASSAGE

next — to contrast valentine’s perception of the world and its future with Septimus’ doomed view, which I beleive leads to his insanity then - to concentrate on how “the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is”; how valentine connects nature to arts of creation?