The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H.G. Parry

Chapter One. I am Born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.’” Charley shivered, just once. He was as pale as he’d been in the car on the way to the hospital. “Do you remember what you wrote about those lines, once? You called them the most perfect opening lines in the history of literature. Because they are all our opening lines. They are how our stories all begin. It was how you began.”

You were alone, and strong, and indomitable.

The occupants of the Street had gathered in the public house as the world shifted. Outside, the cobbles spasmed; buildings creaked, and the sky grew dark. They clustered together for safety. Predictably, this meant they argued.

The new world isn’t for us. It’s not for anybody but him.”

Making noise and trouble was a battle plan in itself under those circumstances—though she hoped other plans would unfold in due course.

“That’s A Lion in the Meadow,” I said slowly. “That’s Mum.”

when he was still mine to teach everything I knew.

I realized then that my desire to protect him, the desire I had chafed at for years, really had very little to do with how frustratingly helpless he could seem. He wasn’t helpless now, frustratingly or otherwise. He was holding a whole world, about to save another. And I wanted to protect him more than I ever had in my life. I didn’t care what he could handle. He shouldn’t have to.

Dont know if we need a wholeebook foor this

I don’t want to write about what happened today. I’m sick of words. I’m sick of their elusiveness and their sharpness and their beauty and their hurt. But if I don’t write it down, then it will still be there in my head, and that will be worse. So I will set it down in the plainest words possible, and rob it of its power. This is how it happened.

“Education never ends, Sutherland,” he said. “It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.” And I know that’s from “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” but it didn’t mean it wasn’t for me.

The person who would kill the whole world to keep him safe.

It was like stepping into the end of the world. At once, my eyes were blinded by a white glow, harsh and pitiless as a flare from an atomic bomb. Almost as blinding was the noise. It struck me in an endless roar. It took me a moment to realize that it was made up of words. Hundreds of thousands of intermingled voices, each crying over each other in fragments. Chapter One. I am Born You have been in every line I have read. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else… And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me. These pages must show.

I am the darkness at the heart of the world, the darkness that even Dickens couldn’t defeat.”

“He’ll destroy your world.” “I know.” I wasn’t being defiant. I was too tired for defiance, and Uriah Heep was too elemental to defy.

into something I couldn’t begin to understand. It was passing into pure language.

It was strange, in a place of pure language, to hear my own laugh bounce around and come back to us.

Yeats.”

Fascist stars

given hot chocolate by the fire. You let me read your comic book.” “Did I? I don’t remember that part.” “I do,” he said. He was in front of me now. I could see him. I could see all of it. And the city glowing with the light of pure meaning was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. … these pages must show. The world came back together.

“I’ve never understood any of these unreal places,” I said. “Let alone this one.”

“Beth wanted to erase the real world and populate it with her own creations. She wanted to retreat into a made-up past. This is the future.”

There’s darkness here, but there’s also hope, illustrated by the network of connections between people across the social divides. I covered that in chapter ten. It balances.” “Sounds like life.” “It is.”

Barf

We love Dickens because he tells us the truth, when the dominant strand of contemporary postmodern literature so often tells us that there is no truth. And there isn’t, perhaps, not that can be put in words. Truth, at least complete truth, isn’t held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.

Hmm...lets not hate on postmodern theory

Arguments are meant to clear the air. This one, when it finally burned out, filled it with smoldering resentment like the acrid aftermath of a chemical fire.

there is no law against a person being made of ideas, intuitions, interpretations, and language. If there were, nobody could ever step outside their door.

“Is it true that literary interpretations like yourself are highly unstable?” a reporter asked. He laughed a little. “You’ll have to take that up with Derrida.”

Lydia has three younger brothers. Can you imagine?

“What we see when we look at people is just a bundle of our own interpretations,

A world of light and shadows, of fact, truth and story, each blurring into one another as sleep and wakefulness blur in the early morning. The moments of our lives unfolding as pages in a book. And everything connected, everyone joined, by an ever-shifting web of language, by words that caught us as prisms caught light and reflected us back at ourselves.

“We changed again, and yet again,” I read, “and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me.”