Sarah Lolley
  • Mailbox Missions
  • NDG Walks
  • What's New
  • Intro to Cryptic Crosswords
  • CBC/QWF Writer-in-Residence
  • Contact Me
  • Puzzle Tutorial
  • Practice Puzzles

The Unbearable Lightness of Cryptics

2/23/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
About a month ago, the Sunday New York Time’s crossword puzzle blew the mind of a man named Shane Ryan and he wrote a fantastic article for Paste Magazine explaining why.

​The theme of the puzzle was Coriolis force (the inertial effect that causes storms to spin in different directions depending on their hemispheric position) and it is applied with such elegance, you really have to see it to appreciate it. 

​“Look, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a hopeless nerd,” he writes. “Maybe this doesn’t seem as impressive to you as it does to me. But:” 
the amount of pleasure this act of brilliance gives me is difficult to describe. It’s just so perfect, so virtuosic, and yet so playful. It’s the Platonic ideal of a crossword puzzle. And the amount of creativity and brainpower it takes to actually conceive of and create it is astounding to me.
Picture
I recognize that feeling Ryan describes—the feeling of stumbling across something that makes an inner part of you explode with understanding and appreciation, and with a kind of thankful joy. It’s the feeling I got when I first started solving cryptics, and the feeling I still get when I come across a particularly brilliant clue.

Within a week of reading Ryan’s article, I randomly came across two similar descriptions of that same feeling. 

The first was from Australian cryptic crossword setter David Astle. Roughly halfway through his book “Cluetopia” he describes the feeling of falling headlong in love with wordplay at the age of four. Discovering that the word “owl” was hidden inside the name of his suburb, Balgowlah, filled him with a sense of wonder that “has never quit my bloodstream,” he writes. One word “was a new door, opening into another way of seeing.”
The late, great neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks described that feeling too, in an interview with the CBC’s brilliant Eleanor Wachtel. The object of his wonderment was the Periodic Table: 
Seeing the table and this wonderful scheme whereby all the elements are shown in relation to one another and having a wonderful pattern of recurrence, so that every eighth element, at least to begin with, seemed to echo the properties of the one before it; this seemed to me the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, the most economical, the most elegant. All of the elements, all of the building blocks of the universe fell into an order
He found the periodic table so reassuring that he carried a pocket-sized version in his wallet for decades.
PictureHiggs + Crick wall art
Sure, these are extreme examples expressed with particular fervour. But don’t we all feel innate satisfaction in taking something chaotic and making it tidy?
​
Isn’t it why we bend over jigsaw puzzles?
Isn’t it why we find Tetris so addictive?
Don't we sell millions of design magazines and produce dozens of “fixer-upper” home TV shows on this soothing promise of order?

And on Saturday mornings, when the Globe and Mail arrives, isn't this why we disregard the headlines, skip the opinion pieces and make our way straight to the black and white square that brims with irresistible possibility?

2 Comments
Vaughan link
2/25/2016 09:55:12 pm

It’s definitely reassuring to know that at the end of the puzzle, all those varied words will interlock beautifully. And the Corolis force puzzle is indeed a magnificent and ingenious construction. Shane Ryan tried to explain the beauty and elegance he saw to readers without them needing (or being able to, after reading the article) to do the puzzle.

In music, composing a canon could be thought to be the equivalent to doing an ingenious interlock. Voices perform the same music, sometimes lengthened or shortened or turned upside down. Everything you write in one voice will have to appear later in another voice, so it constricts your choices, just the way putting a number of themed words into a crossword will constrict choices later. One of the greatest canons is Miserere nostri by Thomas Tallis ( https://youtu.be/-5W67uBRZCo ). It is technically impressive (four voices singing the same part, each slower than the last, and over the top two soprano parts singing the same part a few beats apart), but unlike some other canons (which can be dull), Tallis finds whatever it is he needs to make it a great piece of music.

Likewise, I think, a clever interlock is only part of a great crossword. Definitely not mutually exclusive, of course, but from the solver’s perspective a great puzzle should lead to an enlightening (and satisfying) “Aha!” moment. And maybe this is what inspired Shane Ryan to write the article. But the best puzzles will be a magical combination of interlock clues, and we will go gaga over them.

Reply
Sarah
3/4/2016 10:15:26 am

That's a great point, Vaughan. Shane Ryan was able to convey the mastery of the puzzle in such a way that even readers who aren't versed in puzzles can appreciate it. You did something similar with the Thomas Tallis canon you mentioned. It's a beautiful and haunting piece of music but without your explanation of what makes it so impressive, I wouldn't have been able to hear what you hear.

That's what a great writer (food writer, science writer, travel writer...) can do: show us the mastery and mystery in something we might not otherwise have appreciated as fully as it deserves.

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    About Sarah

    I'm a writer, adventurer, amateur setter of cryptic crosswords, lover of "ah-ha!" moments, and exhausted mom.

    Archives

    November 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2019
    May 2018
    April 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    December 2013

    Categories

    All
    Accents
    Acrostics
    Amazement
    Bob Dylan
    Books
    Brain
    Certainty
    Choose Your Own Adventure
    Chris Hadfield
    Christmas
    Coincidence
    Creativity
    Cryptic Crossword Tutorial
    Editing Puzzles
    ELLE Magazine
    Epiphany
    Escape Room
    Family
    Finding Your Way
    Fraser Simpson
    Globe And Mail
    Group Solving
    Hero
    Hidden Messages
    Homophone Clues
    Horcrux
    Leonard Cohen
    Love
    Making Mistakes
    Maps
    Marriage
    Memory
    #MeToo
    Momentum
    Montreal Review Of Books
    Motherhood
    Music
    Mystery
    Nabokov
    Natural Phenomena
    Oliver Sacks
    Personal Essay
    Personalized Cryptics
    Politics
    Puzzles In Print
    Renovation
    Secrets
    Setting Puzzles
    The Committee Of Sleep
    The Coriolis Effect
    Travel
    Wes Anderson
    Wordplay
    Writer-in-Residence
    Writing
    Yoga

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.