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I don’t know. Sometimes I think my brain opened as far as it could go when I was about seventeen, and its doors have been just stuck there ever since. And now they’re ossifying and collecting cobwebs, and things are spilling in, swirling around for a bit, and then flying out again. And someday they’ll start to swing slowly shut, and I’ll be left in the dark with nothing but a few rustling fragments of thoughts that get thinner and weaker every time I use them. Like tea leaves.
I had a sense then of being suspended between two worlds: the sane one in which I had fallen asleep, and Charley’s, reaching to pull me awake through the speaker of my phone. It was a familiar feeling.
I thought you were sticking to poetry lately. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.” “There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make any sense to anyone.”
“Vampires have weaknesses,” Charley said darkly. “Stoker wrote them in. People are far less predictable.”
I’d never been in Charley’s office before, but it was exactly how I’d pictured it: complete chaos. Mugs littered the desk and peered out from bookshelves, books spilled from every nook and cranny, and the computer was buried beneath pages of scribbled notes. The battered armchair by the window was the only thing clear of clutter, because it was obviously where he sat in order to clutter everything else. It was a Charley-shaped hole in the mess, like an outline at a police crime scene.
So much for keeping exasperation out of my voice. I had never been very good at that.
“I didn’t mean to.” “It doesn’t matter what you mean! It’s what you do. It’s what you always do.”
“God, literary critics must have a field day with you,” I groaned.
I remember knowing, at that moment, that I would do anything—I would kill the whole world—to keep him from being scared or hurt.
He had come into the world trailing dreams and stories and improbabilities,
You’ve never lived more than half in the real world your entire life.
phrases are important. That’s what I’m trying to teach my poetry students at the moment. Words are chosen very carefully. Stories are built from words.”
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,’”
usually, I need the sight of words on paper.
Words on paper are quiet, and porous; in the right mood, I sink down between the gaps in the letters and they close over my head.
This isn’t magic yet either. (Or whatever the word may be.) Still just reading. Or literary analysis? Are they different things? This is just reading deeper.
(I like the word “extraordinary.” Extraordinarius. Out of the common order. More than ordinary. Ordinary plus extra. It looks like “extra-ordinary,” but is in fact just the opposite. If I could make that a noun, the way “magic” can be made a verb, then that would be a good word for what I’m talking about.)
“You know, I think I probably need coffee at this point in the conversation,”
I sort of love my brother’s flat. It’s hopeless, but it’s hopeless with style.
Charley has filled every spare inch of it with books. Books cascade over the surface of the desk in the corner by the window, climb in staggering towers up the walls, pack the bookshelves, crouch on the stairs. They hide in the kitchen amid the pots and pans, frame the old fireplace that hasn’t burned in years, bury the coffee table in front of the couch. I found one in the fridge once, though he swears that was a mistake.
the knowledge that makes no sense.”
His eyes defied all metaphor.
“You don’t believe there’s truth to it then?” “There’s truth to everything,”
One of the things I happen to believe is that truth is always independent of the facts.”
For someone who deals with metaphors for a living, he can be very literal.
I just like liminal spaces. They’re important in literature—in all branches of culture, really. But in story and folklore, they’re where the impossible happen. The spaces between.”
“Anthropologically speaking, ‘rubbish’ is just a word for material unwanted or out of place. Forgotten things that slip between the cracks. That’s what we’re looking for.”
“There is something odd about this cable,” he said. “It’s going through the wall.” “Cables go through walls all the time.” “No, they don’t. Cables go through holes in walls.” I felt a chill. Because he was right, by a pedantic twist of grammar. There was no hole in this wall. There wasn’t even a kink in the plastic where the cable entered the wall. That was what looked so odd. The cable slipped through brick as though it wasn’t there.
I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir, because I’m not myself, you see.
If the Darcys were all handsome, Dorian Gray was beautiful enough to be downright creepy.
I trusted laptops. I didn’t trust living, breathing personifications of Victorian morality tales.
I thought people would want to learn in high school. Perhaps that was naive. It was naive. I’ve read enough books about high school to know better.
Something has to be heard to be ignored.
“I know we must move with the times, but they seem to move so fast.”
What are you afraid of?” “Oh God. Everything.” He considered the question seriously. “I’m afraid of being taken away and experimented on, obviously. But it’s more than that. I’m afraid of being noticed. I’m afraid of being at the center of a new world where I’m hated and feared for what I can do.”
“They don’t like questioning their own reality.
History is every bit as much of a story as fiction.
We’re half words, and half thought.”
It’s just the idea that every book has an implied reader—a sort of imaginary person the author has in mind while he’s writing. I supposed in the Implied Reader’s case, that wasn’t visualized terribly distinctly.”
“Do stop being so Gothic,” Millie sighed. “It’s not half as attractive as you think.”
your little brother is onto Dostoyevsky while you’re struggling to tackle The Hobbit.
“Fantasy is relative,”
“Oh, something’s bound to break tonight,” Millie returned. “A law. A window. The foundations of reality.”
“You always seem to know books by heart,”
“David Copperfield is very important to Dickensian criticism, of course. Or his novel is. Like I told him, it’s semiautobiographical. A good deal of what happens in that book is taken from Dickens’s own life; at times, Dickens and David Copperfield blur so that it’s difficult to tell whose voice is really narrating.
“He’s not a weapon! He’s an academic.
you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?”
I’ve never understood it, how he could be so intelligent and yet so completely oblivious.
Does that not scare you?” “Of course it scares me,” he said, with more heat than I had expected from him. “All of it scares me. But I’m tired of being scared. I’ve been scared my entire life. I know you mean well, I really do. I know you want me to be safe. But I’m exhausted of it. Do you have any idea what it’s like to grow up with everybody looking at you—scrutinizing you—and knowing that if they see what you really are, something terrible will happen?”
“This might come as a surprise to you, Rob, but a lot of problems have been solved by people waving their PhDs at them.”
