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“I want to travel and have real adventures. And when death comes, I want to be wearing my boots.”
“Well, you have a gift with words.” “My father doesn’t think I can survive on writing.” “Hmm. I don’t know about surviving on it, but when you have a gift, it isn’t yours to keep to yourself. It’s the reason you’re here. It’s your purpose.”
“Some people look at snow and think about catching their death of a cold or how a person could get lost in it and meet his end. What could be better than to be wrapped up warm in a coat and to see the soft flakes coming down?” He nodded toward Fanny and Bob up ahead. “Come to think of it, I believe I love my friends better when snow is falling on them.”
“Go write your damn masterpieces!” Louis shouted. Henley and Baxter laughed, but everyone in the room knew Louis was livid when he jabbed his fork emphatically at Henley as he spoke. “When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium. Anyone who entertains me with a great story is a doctor of the spirit. Frankly, it isn’t Shakespeare we take to when we are in a hot corner, is it? It’s Dumas or the best of Walter Scott. Don’t children, especially children, deserve that kind of refuge? Even if it’s poetry?”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it. You are a naturally good girl, Boodle. It will be easy to put yourself in the boots of the hero. As a boy, I always imagined myself as the good fellow on a white horse who was coming to the rescue of the others. But if you want to be a writer, you are going to have to put yourself in the shoes of people who are not so good. Everybody has faults. Some people have a lot of them. Yet no one sees himself as a monster. You need to try being him—or her—to know how she feels and thinks.”
“People seem to think anybody can publish what they write. It’s a craft, for God’s sake.”
Long ago, before he met Fanny, he had made up his mind that marrying another writer would be a mistake. A family could tolerate only one. Well, Fanny had been an aspiring writer before he knew her. Any qualms Louis might have felt about a life with her had inevitably passed. Their time together had become one long conversation—contentious sometimes, yes—yet she had opened his mind in many ways. And Fanny’s mind was keen; she had a wonderful way of seeing things that was all hers. Sometimes her thoughts were so original that they took Louis aback. But she was more intuitive about human nature
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“Show me the ordinary man who does not carry around some other person inside, or at least some question about who he truly is,” Henry said. “What interests me is the borderland—” “—where selves collide.”
“Maybe he knew that life is not an even fight,” Louis mused. “Given the odds, it’s the stand one takes that matters.”
It was how he would have preferred to think of his son, for those earliest years were the most comfortable times for his father as a father. He had read lovingly to Louis when he was small, taken him on outings, showered him with attention. It was when Louis started to form his own opinions that his father had found him impossible to understand. Poor man. What a hopeless cause Thomas Stevenson had faced, trying to shape his odd and puzzling offspring.
“What would you do if my mother-in-law fell overboard?” Fanny asked provocatively after the captain chastised the sprightly woman. Otis stared ahead impassively. “Note it in the log,” he said.
“I believe we have done some good by helping to end cannibalism. As for the rest, I don’t know,” the priest said. “When I came here, the bishop said to me, ‘You are coming into a culture that is more civilized than our own.’ I have pondered that remark a great deal.”
LaFarge was polite, but Adams could not conceal how appalled he was by the spectacle in front of him. He appeared thunderstruck as he gaped at poor Louis, who was wearing grease-streaked white linen trousers with a brown sock on one foot and a purple sock on the other. In the space of a minute, Fanny was fairly certain she loathed Henry Adams.
All these years he’d believed that every time he began a story, it was going to be a journey toward some core of truth. That if he passed the world as he saw it through his soul, somebody, at least he, would be better for it. But what did he know now? Only that his soul was cracked wide open, not a fit vessel for filtering anything.
The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing … For to miss the joy is to miss all.
written with such conviction about “the real knot of our identity” and the “central metropolis of self.” He hardly knew what he meant by those words anymore. What he felt now about identity was simple: All that was me is gone. The Great Exhilarator is dead. Puck is dead.
In the end, what really matters? Only kindness. Only making somebody a little happier for your presence.
“Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.”
He understood enough about his working method to know he would have to be patient; there was no point in forcing words onto paper.
