Dora Klinova, “The Queen of the Universe; the Vortex of Creation,” (c) 2012, Legacy Line Publishing, ISBN 97800-98197-842-0; 80 pages, $26.95, via the author at 619 667-0925. Another 140-page version (with more photos) available through Amazon for $41.95. An electronic version is available at $3.99.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Author Dora Klinova, a Russian-speaking, Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, lives near the Lake Murray municipal reservoir. The interplay of the sun and the lake’s water is a source of never-ending fascination for her, as well as a starting point for her pleasingly speculative imagination.
Suppose each of the water droplets in the lake had personalities. Not knowing that their existence is eternal, would they be frightened as they felt themselves evaporating? Would they feel themselves burning up–and think they are going to die–while being transported as vapor into the clouds?
What emotions would they feel as they looked down at the lake, their former home, from the sky? And as they made the journey back down to the earth as rain, how would the location where they landed affect their emotions? Suppose a droplet landed on a leaf? Or on a street and was carried as runoff into a sewer?
As the droplet that is the heroine of Klinova’s book gains self awareness, it also begins to notice both the beauty and the ugliness in the environment. It is pleased by the natural order and rhythm of things as they were created in nature; but is offended, even angered, by the human-caused pollution that is choking so much of creation.
Klinova’s droplet not only can think, it can motivate. It persuades its fellow droplets to make themselves into a wave and to thereby flush pollution from their midst. And then it decides that if droplets can work together locally, why not globally, to restore the earth so befouled by man?
It decides it will start a school to teach other droplets how to save the environment, and what better place for this school then the very same Lake Murray where the droplet first began to understand itself as a sentient being?
Here the droplets can be taught how nature may turn them into vapor, clouds, rain, snow, ice, steam, and eventually deposit them in brooks, streams, rivers, lakes, marshes, bays, seas and oceans. And here they can be taught to communicate with each other, so as to be able to make waves.
Jeepers, I’ll never be able to look at Lake Murray again in the same way. Up to now, it always seemed like such a placid place.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com