I insert, as of 2019.02.19, an annotation in order to indicate an updating of the wording of §8. The original wording is preserved here in this annotation, while the updated wording is the highlighted portion of §8 to the left. The original wording dates back to 2018.10.26, which is when the original post was published, and is a case of mistaken remembering. Here is the original wording:
He is a Swedish tourist who is telling his story not to the young woman but to other tourists whom Delphine randomly encounters at a seaside beachfront. The old man’s mother had read the stories of Jules Verne to him when he was a little boy, and he is now trying to remember the story of a green ray—a story that he too had never read himself. And not only is Delphine ignorant of the green ray as envisioned by Jules Verne. No other character in the macro-narrative of the film, except for the old Swede, has ever even heard of the green ray before. How, then, would they know it if they saw it? The old Swede has never seen one, either, but he remembers from his misty storybook memories that there may exist such a thing.
My correction is based on a happy occasion, 2019.02.06, when I viewed the film all over again, decades after my original viewing. (On the occasion of my new viewing, I found myself in the pleasant company of these dear colleagues: Lucia Athanassaki, Ewen Bowie, Manon Brouillet, Cléo Carastro, Douglas Frame, Zoie Lafis, Susan Letson, Sarah Nolan, Georgia Tsouni). I realized, as I viewed again the scene that I described in the original wording, that my memory was off in a variety of details, though the general point that I was making can still hold, I think. Here is where my memory went wrong: the man who tells about the green ray is not a Swede but a German. He and his wife (I now infer, from the credits shown at the end of the film) have both read the romantic novel of Jules Verne. I don’t know any more why I “remembered,” mistakenly, that the man had not read the text, or why I “remembered” that he had said he had once heard the text read to him as a child. Anyway, I take this opportunity to rewrite my mistaken wording, as highlighted in §8.