The season finale of LOST, particularly the dream-like cameoed conversation on the shore between Jacob and a dark figure being dubbed Nemesis ("...the name Nemesis is related to the Greek word νείμειν, meaning 'to give what is due'"... [Wiki]) evokes thoughts of literature encountered in the past. Whether these other literary works have anything to do with LOST in the sense of being influences or objects of tribute, or merely have a similar flavor because they overlap in areas of theme, who knows? To mention, though, for the possible interest and comment of the LOST tribe....

Roger Zelazny not only wrote the very ancient-Egyptian-flavored Creatures of Light and Darkness but also the delightful Amber series. Amber, in these books, is akin to the prime dimension or central reality around which there are countless variations. S/he who controls Amber, controls the pivotal fulcrum point around which all else is patterned and shifted. Or, in Wiki's words, "...In the Amber stories, Amber is the only true world; all others, including our Earth, are but "shadows" of the tension between it and Chaos. A second world, the Courts of Chaos, is situated in Shadow at the very edge of Chaos itself. Royals of Amber who have negotiated the Pattern, and the equivalent Chaos nobility who have navigated the Logrus, can freely travel through the shadows. By shifting between shadows, one can appear to alter reality by simply choosing which elements of which shadows to keep, and which to switch between." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_...s_of_Amber

In Dante's Inferno there are levels to Hell and likewise in French artist Jean ("Moebius") Giraud's The Airtight Garage" there are levels, worlds within worlds, in a sense, with a rather LOSTian feel to them, as with the Giraud-influenced film IMMORTAL ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_(film) and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Giraud ).

-K mentioned Ovid's Metamorphoses describing "the creation and history of the world" in which "The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is that of love — be it personal love or love personified in the figure of Amor (Cupid). Indeed, the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated, and made ridiculous by Amor, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon who is the closest thing this mock-epic has to a hero. Apollo comes in for particular ridicule as Ovid shows how irrational love can confound the god of pure reason. The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses ...This, in turn, joggled loose a memory from my clogged synapses, the name of a comic book series I read in the late 1980's or early 1980's: Metamorphoses. I'd been thinking of those comics because in them a notion was advanced of doings elsewhere and elsewhen by "gods" having profound impacts and outcomes here and now for ordinary barnyard variety mortals. The LOST similarity is in the sense that beings who are in some ways "more" than the average asleep-at-the-donkey-wheel human animal have their hands dipped in the streams of time, cause, and effect such that they are generating ripples which spread out, interweave, and rebound in complicated patterns.

LOST's season finale this year has much more of an epic feel to it than in years past, imho. It is as if Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorcock, Jean Giraud, and Yang the Nauseating all had a hand in LOST this time around.

Speaking of the late great Yang the Nauseating (Bob Aspirin's SCA name), another literary association which has been tickling at the back of my mind hails from a fascinating sailing-ship port city named Sanctuary in the wonderful Thieves World universe, edited by Robert Aspirin ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves_World ) - this being the intriguing character Torezalan Strick tiFiraqa, a White mage. White and magical he is, like LOST's Jacob appearing in white and seeming magical. If asked for aid then Torezalan Strick tiFiraqa (or Strick, for short) will grant it to anyone who asks, but there is always a Price. The Price (which could be a ring, a candy bar, a compass...) is not Strick's fee, but a tangible symbolic token given representing something deeper, more numinous. It is as if the Price which is invariably required is a _sacrifice_ needed in order to power a shift amongst the flows & patterns of probability & chance in the universe so as to alter outcomes. Sacrifice, changing fate, a white mage figure....

Anyhow, for whatever these musings and reflections may be worth, if anything, they are offered up to the tribe.