The Invention of Hugo Cabret

"Sometimes I come up here at night, even when I'm not fixing the clocks, just to look at the city. I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too."

I finished reading this book aloud to the girls I homeschool and this specific excerpt jumped out at me. I think I reread it three or four times. It has so much air and life around it. The young boy, Hugo, in the book is the one who said this as he was all alone in the world with no family and only the one friend, a little girl, who he was talking to. I love the idea of the machine being compared to the world with nothing extra, just clean, perfectly picked parts, all moving and working together to produce something that is needed, with a purpose.

The story in the book is so fascinating and mysterious and exciting and at the end, there is a great revelation and it is so satisfying. One of the characters in the book was a great film director, Georges Méliès. In a random act of synchronicity, I was curious about his reality and career after we read the last page of the book. It was a fictional book but that character was too specific and so I did a google search on him....
Just two hours earlier, the girls and I started our Greek Mythology unit. We talked about the 12 main gods and goddesses and I had them each pick one they were most interested in to do some extra research on. K picked Persephone and A picked Aphrodite, both perfectly predictable and fitting to their personalities. 

I told them a little about Aphrodite and how she was married to Hephaestus, a lame and grotesque god of blacksmiths and sculptors and volcanoes and the Underworld.  It reminded me of the FABULOUS and eclectic movie The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen and I was so excited to tell them about the part where Aphrodite and Hephaestus make an appearance. 

I silently relived all the times I had seen it and how my brother, Paul, and I would laugh hysterically at the all the outrageous antics and put on brave faces during the scenes with the winged creature of death. They, of course, had never heard of it so I continued to tell them with excitement and even showed them a few pictures online. I vowed to one day rent it and make them watch it after school.

So we continued with math and lunch and word study and then onto finishing The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Fast forward to my interest in Georges Méliès and the google search that brought me to his IMDB page. There, in the list of his many French films in the early 1900's was Les Hallucinations du Baron de Münchausen or Baron Munchausen's Dream! 

What the???  

That stopped me in my tracks!  It was a succinct and blatant synchronicity and I reveled in it for a few seconds.  I tried to get the girls to understand how wonderfully coincidental it was, but they weren't as impressed.  I absolutely loved it and can't wait to go watch it again.