Set This House in Order deleted scenes
The size of the geography
The following originally appeared in chapter 7, on what is page 97 of the published version, in between the paragraph that ends “...reducing the island to a vague outline.” and the one that begins “I said that my father controlled the weather in the geography.”:
“How big is this internal universe of yours?”: that’s another Julie question, one that you might think couldn’t have a proper answer, given that distances inside are optional. But it does; it does have an answer.
The real universe is infinite, or at least very, very big. Nowadays this is common knowledge, but there was a time, hundreds of years ago, when people believed that the universe was tiny. The reason for this belief, my father says, was that back in the Middle Ages people thought that they were the most important thing in the universe—that they were, in other words, the universe’s reason for being. And since human souls, however wonderful they might be, are limited in all sorts of ways, it only made sense that a universe created for the sake of human souls would be limited too.
Well, the geography in Andy Gage’s head really was created for the sake of the souls that occupy it. We are the geography’s sole reason for being, and so it, like us, is finite: finite in its apparent dimensions (the forest you see around the edges of the map does not go on forever), and finite, even small, in the number of things it contains. One consequence of this finiteness is that the geography is a lot less chaotic, a lot safer, than the outside world. Inside, there are no marauding crows, no escaped circus tigers. No cougars. It is a place of order.
Not perfect order: there are still other souls to contend with, after all. But order enough that elements of disorder tend to stand out. Elements like the mist on the lake.
Though I liked this a lot, it conveys no essential information, it’s a little too long for an aside, and, most important, it doesn’t fit organically with the rest of the passage. Rather, this is a instance of the author saying, “I’m going to disrupt the narrative flow here to toss in this cool extra bit of business that just occurred to me.” Sometimes it’s OK to do that, but in this case my editor felt, and I ultimately agreed, that we should cut it.