Friday, May 22, 2020

My Job

My job for the DUNE book club (not to be confused with the Doomed Book Club) is to count up to the epigraph where we're going to stop each week. You see, the author of DUNE did not see fit to number his chapters! Each chapter does start with an epigraph, so, for example, this week we're going to stop at the epigraph that begins "There is no escape." Let it be said that I've never once counted the correct number of epigraphs in all my tenure as the official epigraph counter of the DUNE book club. I flip a page too hastily and miss an epigraph, or something distracts me, or something. This time I forgot how many epigraphs I had counted because as I rapidly made my way, an owl caught my eye! You are by now well aware of my conviction that every book has an owl in it, and my compulsion to record the evidence. Not only did the owl in DUNE catch my eye, but in that split second as I raced past the page, the number of epigraphs I had already counted lost to me forever, I recognized that the owl in DUNE comes from a Biblical owl quotation we have discussed on this "blog" before!