So much for providing an example of the thread of building character as I had planned. I’ve gone astray and ended up in a more philosophical Ham Sandoval that despite his war-lost (?) father, his mother-lost (?) brother, and being left beside the road deep in the woods has managed to become part of a family. Oddly knowing how to relate, his closeness to Maria, the youngest daughter becomes his routine, facing down his mother in a courtroom, deciding hatred is the best door he could find.
Then there is a knack and love of numbers, calculations, reason:
(Ham on coincidence)
We think in time regardless of the nature of time and space, just as we are spatial beings. Time could be the smell of wood smoke and it wouldn’t matter to time. Hence any time is the opportunity for things to happen. Coincidences are the result of population and the innevitability of place and nature. Place, time, events and motion–they simply are.
So if a bug falls to the earth and splats at the same moment as some other body falls and splats, we need not attribute cause. But we will.
These are ways to think about a missing family, unanswered questions, I think, without the pain of feelings. I think that what Ersinghaus is giving us is almost a diversion to the mundane likenesses of lives by bringing the enormity of the image in focus. Ham needs to overcome the loss of three people he barely knows by comparing it to the vastness and the importance of the universe.
Or so I think.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology