BSG: Islanded In A Stream of Stars

[tzikeh]

I've seen a lot of "Is this supposed to be about the song "Islands in the Stream?" posts and comments around, so I want to set things aright. (Plus - c'mon, BSG naming an episode after a Kenny Rogers/Dolly Parton duet? The Beatles one I can kind of forgive, but....)



Okay. The episode title is a quote from the book The Outermost House by Henry Beston. The full quote is "For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars--pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."

The relevance of the quote is self-explanatory, I guess, but a little biographical knowledge helps. Beston was an ambulance guy in WWI, and was at Verdun. If you are unfamiliar with Verdun, it was probably the the battle with the most deaths and casualties of any in WWI, I think--something INSANE, like half a million (maybe more?) So the title has great allusory relevance to BSG at this point. (Is allusory a word?)

(Total geek moment: one of the French Generals at Verdun said to his soldiers, "They shall not pass" (except he said it in French--any help from the really really good French-speakers out there?)--which is where Tolkien got the phrase for Gandalf. For those who say LotR *isn't* about Tolkien's experiences in WWI, I say SUCK IT. Though I don't know if he was at Verdun.)

After the war, he (Beston, not Gandalf or Tolkien) isolated himself from pretty much the whole world, and lived in a teeny tiny little house on Cape Cod, right on the beach, that had no neighboring houses, hence "the outermost house."

(Yes, I'm currently studying the Naturalist movement in American Literature; why do you ask?)

Comments

[theodosia.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for the explication -- it does add to my understanding of the episode, and is so very apt.

Tolkien was at the Somme.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien#World_War_I

[phoenix64.livejournal.com]

Of course people's minds didn't go to the Hemingway novel (which incidentally, is where mine went, so thanks for the edification), just straight to the Rogers/Parton song.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

:) Well, it's probably his least well known novel, since he never finished it--I don't think it was even published til the 60s, was it?

[dottheeye.livejournal.com]

Ils ne passeront pas.

And wow, thanks for the fascinating post. I didn't know where the BSG title came from and that is very cool. And although I knew JRRT fought in WWI (and agree with you that those experiences inform LotR), I did not know of the connection between the French general's quote and Gandalf. Very cool!