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I have a couple of items for today’s write-up on Stephen King’s IT:
1. The members of the Losers’ Club want to make silver slugs to use against IT, and Bill and Richie go to Kitchener Precision Tool & Die to buy material stuff for that project. Page 846 says the following:
“When Bill asked how much a couple of two-inch bearing molds might cost, Carl Kitchener—who looked like a veteran boozehound and smelled like an old horse-blanket—asked what a couple of kids wanted with bearing molds. Richie let Bill speak, knowing things would probably go easier that way—children made fun of Bill’s stutter; adults were embarrassed by it. Sometimes this was surprisingly helpful. Bill got halfway through the explanation he and Richie had worked out on the way over—something about a model windmill for next year’s science project—when Kitchener waved for him to shut up and quoted them the unbelievable price of fifty cents per mold. Hardly able to believe their good fortune, Bill forked over a single dollar bill.”
Conventional wisdom states that articulate, smooth, charming people with savvy are the ones who get what they want. But there can be cases in which the opposite is true: a person who creates an awkward atmosphere can also get what he wants. In this passage, Bill stutters, Carl Kitchener wants that awkward situation to end, and so he grants Bill’s request, before Bill can even finish making it. I doubt that using awkwardness to one’s advantage works all of the time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are at least some times when it does work.
2. After the members of the Losers’ Club kill IT as adults, they start to forget things—who their fellow members of the Losers’ Club are, who IT was, etc. Mike Hanlon has been recording events in a journal, and he has also written down the names and numbers of his friends in the Losers’ Club. But those names and numbers are starting to vanish. Page 1125 has interesting thoughts from Mike Hanlon:
“I suppose I could preserve [the names and numbers]; I could just keep copying them. But I’m also convinced that each would fade in its turn, and that very soon it would become an exercise in futility—like writing I will not throw spit-balls in class five hundred times. I would be writing names that meant nothing for a reason I didn’t remember. Let it go, let it go.”
I do not understand why the force that brought the Losers’ Club together to fight IT wants them to forget each other and their task after it is done. Couldn’t that accomplishment inspire or instruct the members of the Losers’ Club as they continue through life? Bill at the end of the book learns some lessons from the childhood that he is increasingly forgetting—about mortality, for example. So why must they forget? So that they might have a fresh beginning at life, or better fit into the world of adult realism (whereas, on some level, they needed a childlike faith even as adults to defeat IT, and that might not serve them well as adults)?
