Slade House

by David Mitchell

I’m about to ask Mum how such a big house and its garden can possibly fit in the space between Slade Alley and Cranbury Avenue, but my question falls down a deep well with no bottom, and I forget what I’ve forgotten.

What do you do when you’re visiting someone’s house and their garden starts vanishing?

Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream.

“There’s no such thing as ‘a long time ago.’ ”

Fred Pink was down the town library,

People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating.”

‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’—John Milton,

Death’s life’s only guarantee, yes? We all know it, yet we’re hardwired to dread it. That dread’s our survival instinct and it serves us well enough when we’re young, but it’s a curse when you’re older.”

I let Jonah die his futile death alone—proving, I suppose, that my love of survival is stronger than my love for Jonah. Survival is also an ally against Grief: if I buckle now, I won’t survive.

Every writer is a walking bundle of archetypal themes. If you have more than one, consider yourself lucky, though a single theme can be enough—Nathaniel Hawthorne only ever wrote about guilt, but he wrote about it so brilliantly, who cares? Maybe the average number is about four? My themes include predacity, the eternal conflict between human beings who cooperate and human beings who are competitive and predatory. Another of my archetypal themes is language, especially when it goes wrong: speech impediments, miscommunication, autism, translation, nonmastery of a second language, being able to kind of express what you mean but not having the software to do it perfectly, and what it’s like to be sort of stuck in a prison house of language through whose barred windows you have to shout. Thirdly, cause and effect. Why do things happen the way they do? Were they preordained? If so, by whom, and how? Or free will? Can free will ever really be “free”? If not—and it seems not—then why not? In my first novel, each of the sections is sort of an essay in fiction that gives a different answer to this question.