Are there picturesque lives? Who has lived them? Most aesthete lives are picturesque, but plenty of picturesque lives aren’t aesthete ish.
The picturesque stuff and stories and the future stuff should go together. Both are about frames or excluding certain information which makes them different from life. Pictures have frames stories are frames maybe. Not sure, might want to see SEP Def’s of fiction/stories
History become myths or legends similarly, by tumbling off the details through telling and time somewheres become anywhere and someone’s anyone’s. (Image of a pebble tumbling in a river)
Redology/studying the Genji seem more interesting than being a Tolkien obsessive because studying Tolkien bottoms out in either going metatextual or accepting that Tolkien just made it up/stopped making it up. Tolkien’s universe is entirely fictional. I.e. it’s possibilities are not densely packed/propositional. Alternate histories like the genji and dream of the red chamber don’t have this problem. This relates to the actual powers branching view of modality that Oppy and stuff support. Realism and unicorns
PKD’s idea of the trash stratum is that anything forgotten long enough will become magical again. It will become an ancient relique, of great power. The same applies to rituals and texts. cf sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic
Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson - Poems | Academy of American Poets https://poets.org/poem/richard-cory