Question is to Authority as Answer is to ?

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell entertains the reader with footnotes thus situating the reader as a type of scholar and thus kin to the magician protagonists of the novel (they read a lot of books, annotated books no doubt). The second note in the chapter entitled "The education of a magician" sets up an analogy whose terms are likely to criss-cross and become entangled (much like the plot in miniature).

Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Apart from its semblance to the form of a semiotic square, it is the slippage of the term "sane" that makes the proposition enchanting.

And so for day 257
28.08.2007