Seven Roads

In John Myers Myers's narrativized compendium of literature, titled Silverlock, just at the beginning of the sixth chapter a vaguely Shakespearean character named Rosalette (probably after As You Like It's Rosalind, at least partially) sings a song to Shandon, the main character, that puts him to sleep. The song is called "Seven Roads" and goes like this:

Seven roads could lead thee here,
Seven have betrayed me, dear.
Seven could and none have done;
Rank imposters, every one:
Liars caught in lies, my sweet,
There's no road without your feet.
Where you're not, there is no land.
There's no touch without your hand.
Here, I know, is not a place
For it does not hold your face.
But there's one that I must find
Where you wander, though I'm blind
Without your eyes.

As poetry, it's relatively unsophisticated. It's a simple little tune that a sweet girl sings as she's lost, looking for her lover in the forest. The phrase "seven roads" is an allusion to some mythology or other (I have not done that research, and probably won't ever), but it also sounds like an allusion to the seven paths of education mentioned on this website: http://sevenroads.org/. There's a link on that page to a document propounding the many literary, mythological, and superstitious uses of the number seven.

It's a fascinating connection for me - the number seven and erudition. When I was six years younger than I am now, I told a group of people that I enjoy memorizing poetry because it's deeply romantic, and one of them asked me, "What poem would you recite to your true love?" And this was the one that came to mind. What if, as the mythology signified by "seven roads" we substitute paths of erudition for the mythological allusion? What if, to my true love whom I have not yet chosen, I say that I sit here in this forest of a PhD program, lost and waiting for him? All seven roads are false betrayers. All forms of earthly knowledge are useless without access to their ultimate purpose, which is the furtherance of the human situation.

Ultimately, the human situation relies on the Big Idea God proposed in our pre-earth-life. What it basically boils down to, is God wants His children home again, and ready for the next step. It's a huge work that requires that every individual be married and sealed together, from each generation to the generations before and after so we're all bound as a family. It's all optional, but nobody's going to be forgotten. I'm waiting for my turn to jump in. I've got one leg already, as I'm sealed to my parents, but I want all in, and that requires a husband. So I wander my little PhD forest and curse the roads that lead him somewhere else, and remind myself that God keeps His promises.