Double Thoughts

Remember this post from back in January? I thought that idea was freakin’ brilliant.

But we were watching One Day, and Emma says the same thing when she is reading a page from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles :

“She suddenly thought one afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely there. When was it?”

The ChickieNob and I paused the show to look it up because I didn’t remember it in the book. (It turns out it is in there as a quote before a chapter.) But they made it a scene in the television show, so it stood out, whereas my eye passed over someone else’s words in the book. Was this brilliant idea from 1891 the first time it was said? Was it a copy then, too? Did my brain partially remember reading it, even though I sometimes skip over those quotes that begin chapters?

And did Dann McDorman, the author of West Heart Kill, know it had already been said? Did he read it himself or pick it up from a conversation with someone else? The transfer of ideas or the same thought popping up in two different worlds over a century apart?