Infinite Summer

So in my endnote 332 (page 1074) there is a note re Tavis' monologue containing the line "Bernadette Longley looks like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around."

This is a fantastic/evocative description but one I've read earlier--it was Joelle's way of describing Ruth van Cleve (698).

Why is this repeated? It doesn't seem likely that Joelle and Tavis would have the same thought. Or, was it an oversight edited out in later editions of IJ (I have a first edition)? Any ideas? Thanks.

There are a few things that are repeated like that in the novel, though I can't recall them specifically. I would just chalk something like that up to the fact that this is a big damn book and certain ideas/descriptions are bound to be repeated a couple times.

It's deliberate fractal repetitions. Look up, say, the Mandelbrot set (a very nice fractal) on wikipedia. Certain visual patterns appear over and over, infintely. That's the structure of the novel. There's like, hundreds of these kinds of things in the novel - certainly more than I can keep track of.