The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext by Heather Marcelle Crickenberger

Threads

"I was not ten years old when M. Grépinet, my master in the junior class, read us out the fable of the Man and the Genie. Yet I remember the tale better than if I had read it yesterday. A genie gives a boy a ball of thread, and tells him: 'This is the thread of your life. Take it. When you find time heavy on your hands, pull it out; your days will pass quick or slow according as you unwind the ball rapidly or little by little. So long as you leave the thread alone, you will remain stationary at the same hour of your existence." The boy took the thread first he pulled at it to become a man, then to marry the girl he loved, then to see his children grow up, to win offices and profit and honour, to abridge anxieties, to escape griefs and the infirmities that came with the years, and finally, alas! to cut short a peevish old age. He had lived just four months and six days since the date of the genie's visit ... " (Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus p.13).

Ariadne’s Thread: Color--the “visited” link in hypertext. The idea of “Traces”—tracks. The narrator. The wake of the flâneur: the feeling of being typed—the flâneur lables and names

Ariadne’s Thread:

“We have seen in the story of Theseus how Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, after helping Theseus to escape from the labyrinth, was carried by him to the island of Naxos and was left there asleep, while Theseus pursued his way home without her. Ariadne, on waking and finding herself deserted, abandoned herself to grief. But Venus took pity on her, and consoled her with the promise that she should have an immortal lover, instead of the mortal one she had lost.

The island where Ariadne was left was the favorite island of Bacchus, the same that he wished the Tyrrhenian mariners to carry him to, when they so treacherously attempted to make prize of him. As Ariadne sat lamenting her fate, Bacchus found her, consoled her and made her his wife as Minerva had prophesied to Theseus. As a marriage present he gave her a golden crown, enriched with gems, and when she died, he took her crown and threw it up into the sky. As it mounted the gems grew brighter and were turned into stars, and preserving its form Ariadne's crown remains fixed in the heavens as a constellation, between the kneeling Hercules and the man who holds the serpent.

Spenser alludes to Ariadne's crown, though he has made some mistakes in his mythology. It was at the wedding of Pirithous, and not Theseus, that the Centaurs and Lapithae quarrelled.

’Look how the crown which Ariadne wore
Upon her ivory forehead that same day
That Theseus her unto his bridal bore,
When the bold Centaurs made that bloody fray
With the fierce Lapiths which did them dismay;
Being now placed in the firmament,
Through the bright heaven doth her beams display,
And is unto the stars an ornament,
Which round about her move in order excellent.’” (taken from http://www.online-mythology.com/ariadne/)

Note also [see reference in “Arachnology” about Ariadne being connected with the image of the spider.]