Diane’s Newsletter 16th April 2019

FOUR
 
April is the fourth month of the year, and here is some varied information about the number 4.

In numerology, 4 is a disciplined, practical number with an occasional tendency towards obstinacy. It is a builder; it is connected to the land and nature; it usually does not shy away from hard work. It desires both justice and stability. On the negative side, 4 can sometimes feel restricted and/or can focus too much on details, missing the bigger picture. 4 must guard against becoming too rigid in its outlook and its way of doing things. The colour associated with 4 is green. You may recognize some of these things if your birthday is 4, 13 or 22, if the first letter of your name is D, M or V, or if your Life Path number (month + day + year of birth), Expression number (the total value of all the letters in your name), or Motivation number (all the vowels in your name) equals 4.

As we know, there are four cardinal points, four sides to a square, four elements, four seasons, clovers with four leaves, four winds, four blood types, four main castes in India and four phases of the moon.

In Buddhism, there are four noble truths. In Judaism, there are the four Matriarchs: Sarah, Rebekah, Leah and Rachel. Christianity has four gospels, while in Hinduism, the god Brahma has four faces. In Islam, there are four holy books: Torah, Zaboor, Injeel, Quran.

The Pythagoreans claimed that 4 (or the Tetrad) was a perfect number, and they used it to symbolize God.

There are four terrestrial planets – Earth, Venus, Mercury and Mars – and four gas planets – Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn.

During my research into the number 4, I discovered something called tetraphobia, which is a fear of the number 4. This phobia is evidently common in Asia where the word for 4 is pronounced similarly to the word for death. In these countries it is not uncommon for many buildings to skip 4 as a building, room or floor number. I suppose that this similar to the Western superstition with the number 13 (which, if you add the 1 and the 3, equals 4).

It may also be of interest that the London fire of 1666 burnt for four days and that, during the plague, people made a mixture of four herbs – lavender, sage, thyme and rosemary – in an effort to ward off the plague and remain healthy.

Finally, a quatrain is a poem consisting of four lines, and all insects (except flies) have four wings.

Books with four in the title:
Four Blind Mice by James Patterson
The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
The Four Graces by D E Stevenson
The First Four Years by L I Wilder
 
 

UTOPIA
 
There is a point in The Waiting Room, where one of the characters wonders about the word utopia. He wonders if there has ever existed such a place. We tend to think of a utopia as being a wonderful state of existence, free from all the worry and hassle and negativity of ordinary, everyday life, but is that true?

The Oxford University Dictionary defines utopia as: An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. In the blurb to Lyman Tower Sargent’s book Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction, we learn that ‘There are many debates about what constitutes a utopia’. Sargent throws out the question (among many): ‘Are utopias benign or dangerous?’. He notes ‘that some thinkers see a trajectory from utopia to totalitarianism, with violence an inevitable part of the mix.’

There are all kinds of utopias (democratic, socialistic, right-wing, feminist… ), and one would like to feel that within the framework of that particular movement or belief everything is utopian or perfect. However, according to Sargent, this is probably not the case because the nature of utopia is contradictory. All societies, would-be utopian or otherwise, have conflicting desires, which means that it is impossible for the desires of everyone comprising that society to be satisfied simultaneously. As the idea with utopia is that all desires are satisfied at the one and same time, it follows that a genuine utopian state is impossible to achieve.
 

 
 

DIARIES
 
I was searching through some papers the other day, and I found a number of old diaries. I am not what you would call a consistent diary writer, but I have occasionally kept a diary (if not for a whole year, at least for several months).

As I was turning over the pages in one of these diaries I began to wonder why we actually write diaries. In most cases, they are very private – in fact, some diaries come complete with lock and key – so we don’t write them with the idea of sharing our experiences and ideas with others. If the only person who will ever read what has been written in a diary is the person who wrote it, then the whole exercise seems rather pointless.

Of course, this brings to me to the next part of the puzzle: what happens after we have moved on – permanently? Do we leave strict instructions for all our diaries to be burnt, or do we simply hope that no one will have the patience to wade through the many pages of our intense scribblings? Do we really want to leave our innermost thoughts and musings for others to read, or is it of no particular concern? To us? To anyone else?

Of course, some diaries have become famous: Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Franz Kafka, Anne Frank… and in the majority of these cases the person was famous before he/she wrote the diary. Many such diaries give us an insight into places, experiences and ways of thinking, and are often very interesting. But when it comes to normal human beings, the diaries end up a drawer, hidden between papers or books or accumulated keepsakes until someone retrieves them and exclaims: ‘Oh, my goodness! Did she/he really think/believe/say/do that?’

So the question remains: should one hold on to one’s diaries, or should one consider consigning them to the flames before they have to fend for themselves, completely on their own? Whether the fact that diaries written decades ago can sometimes contain important observations of contemporary society is worth considering or not will, no doubt, depend on how such observations weigh up against all the other, more personal, reflections.

There will be more on this subject in the next Newsletter. In the meantime, I would love to hear what you think about the be-or-not-to-be of diaries.
 
 

THE WAITING ROOM
 
The Waiting Room is a room somewhere in a building in a dystopian or totalitarian state, and though there are a number of people in the waiting room, the focus of the book is on only three of them – two of whom can see nothing wrong with the society, and a third who despairs of the enormous changes to his way of life. Each of these three people experiences his or her present situation in the light of what has happened in the past – individual experiences and perspectives that join together to create three different interpretations of what the future may hold. Is one of these interpretations right and the other two wrong, or are they all right or all wrong? To what extent does perception mould belief, and is there any connection between what we believe to be true and the reality that we call life?

Find out more about the book here.