100 Things:
100 favorite scenes from anything (books, movies, TV, fanfic, etc)Scene #8: Walking on clouds from "Centaur Aisle"
(I think) by Piers Anthony
When I was a kid, the way I related to the author Piers Anthony followed a trajectory that will probably be familiar to a lot of you who are about my age. *g* I discovered the Xanth books when I was pretty young, loved them, read a number of other things he'd written (with reactions ranging from of "oh, that was kind of neat" to "WHAT did I just READ?!") and then, as I got a little older, started to hit the OH PIERS ANTHONY NO point, when I realized that his attitudes towards women (among other things ... but mainly women), as expressed in his books, are really really bizarre and not in a good way. (To give you some idea, there is one character in the Xanth books whose monthly "cycle" causes her to transition from being beautiful, stupid and submissive at one extreme, to ugly, smart and combative at the other. In another of his books -- I don't think this was a Xanth book -- one of the female characters accidentally experiences a magical genderswap and, as soon as she becomes male, is seized with lust for her female traveling companion and has to be restrained from raping her, due to the sudden influx of testosterone. These are but two examples in a VERY LONG LIST. I'm not attempting to suggest he's a bad
person necessarily -- apparently he does a lot to encourage new authors and could be quite a nice guy for all I know -- but the way that his books handle women ... agh. Even when I was in my staunchly antifeminist teenage years, it skeeved me in a major way; I hesitate to imagine how I'd react now, but throwing the book across the room would probably be a good start.)
But still, having read these books at a formative age, there are a few things that stuck with me -- they really were very inventive and full of neat concepts that resonated with my 8-year-old self, and one of those scenes that I sometimes think about is a sequence that I'm pretty sure comes from the Xanth novel "Centaur Aisle", in which the characters had to get from one place to another, and did it by walking on clouds. They used a magical salve that would cause any treated part of the body to interact with clouds as if the clouds were solid. They rubbed it on their feet, obviously, and also on their hands so that they could catch themselves if they stumbled, because it's a loooong way down. And, because clouds are moving and reshaping all the time, they had to be careful that the particular part of the cloud they were on didn't wisp away to nothing while they were on it, leaving them with nothing underfoot.
There was something very compelling about the way that the whole scene was -- well,
realistic is not really the right word, but at least for me as a kid, it did a wonderful, very visceral job of capturing the exciting, slightly chilly, beautiful-but-scary feeling of standing on a cloud, with all that space under your feet and the slightly unsettling awareness that the cloud is only solid when it touches certain parts of your body. I still think about it when I have an opportunity to look down on clouds from above (as from an airplane or a mountain) and I can't help imagining standing on them, and walking quickly just in case your particular cloud starts to disintegrate underfoot.
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