Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

by Dan Simmons

Poetry is only secondarily about words. Primarily, it is about truth. I dealt with the Ding an Sich, the substance behind the shadow, weaving powerful concepts, similes, and connections the way an engineer would raise a skyscraper with the whiskered-alloy skeleton being constructed long before the glass and plastic and chromaluminum appears. And slowly the words returned. The brain retrains and retools itself amazingly well. What had been lost in the left hemisphere found a home elsewhere or reasserted their primacy in the damaged regions like pioneers returning to a fire-damaged plain made more fertile by the flames. Where before a simple word like “salt” would leave me stuttering and gasping, my mind probing emptiness like a tongue prodding the socket of a missing tooth, now the words and phrases flowed back slowly, like the names of forgotten playmates. During the day I labored in the slimefields, but at night I sat at my splintered table and wrote my Cantos by the light of a hissing ghee lamp. Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” He was droll but incomplete. During those long months of beginning my Cantos on Heaven’s Gate, I discovered that the difference between finding the right word as opposed to accepting the almost right word was the difference between being struck by lightning and merely watching a lightning display.