three of wands and iris murdoch quote

[{k}]

i've just finished reading iris murdoch's novel "the bell" and one sentence in it immediately reminded me of the 3 of wands (rws):

"our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port." (page 165 in my edition)

i know that the 3 of wands is often interpreted as being about "waiting for the ships to come in" in the positive sense, but as i don't use reversals i like the way the quote above suggests it can go either way, good or bad and that sometimes your actions trigger a whole chain of events that have nothing to do with your initial intention.

maybe some of you will like the quote as well, so i thought i'd share it

kat

(if this should be in the rider-waite-smith section, please move it. but i thought the image might be similar in other decks as well)

 

[nisaba]

Thank you.

It often happens I'll be reading, and I'll find something that reminds me of a card or series of cards.

Two or three days ago I rather reverse-engineered that: I was spending some serious time with a deck I intended to review (I had been given a freebie as a review-copy, so it would have been rather churlish of me not to review it!), and I was also reading a Val McDiarmid book, an action/detective/mystery type thingie, which was surprisingly well-written given its sensationalist cover and genre.

So there I was, going from deck to book, and from book to deck, wanting to read an enjoyable book and get to kn ow the deck better at the same time. The book was divided between four protagonists, each of them getting a page or two of the action at any stage, then handing over to another. Now, this just shows how skilled I am at time-management <smirk>: I managed to both read my book devotedly and go ahead in leaps and bounds getting to know the deck. How? Every time the book handed over to a different hero (or anti-hero), I'd read only until I came to the very first mention of their name, then I'd throw three cards to tell me what was going to happen to them in this section. At first I thought it was disappointingly inaccurate - then I realised the deck was doing prophesy, and was not telling me about the section I was currently reading at all, but about the *next* section that character featured in! <laughter>

I love it when books and cards talk to each other - I read a lot of both of them. And I go through author-periods, too: my major Iris Murdoch period was right after my Doris Lessing period, in the very late 1980s and early 1990s. Of course, I do revisit: I'm contemplating re-reading "The Flight from the Enchanted by IM for the fourth or fifth time again soon - what's happening between the brothers interests me and even though I'm good at reading the stuff authors don't directly tell you about, I haven't worked out their relationship yet.