Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

I believed in fairies, woodsprites, numerology, astrology, and the magic of Midsummer’s Eve deep in the primitive forests of the NAP. Like Keats and Lamb in Haydon’s studio, don Balthazar and I drank toasts to “the confusion of mathematics” and mourned the destruction of the poetry of the rainbow by M. Newton’s prying prism.

Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and Heaven’s Gate was no exception. The Atmospheric Protectorate owned my body but my mind—or what was left of it—was mine.

The execrable, undisciplined, limp-wristed flatulent products of those reveries already have been described.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY’S most honored writer, William Gass, once said in an interview: “Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.” And so they are. As pure and transcendent as any Idea which ever cast a shadow into Plato’s dark cave of our perceptions. But they are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russell who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: “Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”