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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Perhaps it is true that you really only look at a person the first time you see him, and after that you do a quick bit of mental shorthand each time you recognize him.
“Yes,” he said. “But I wonder … I’ve a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out.”
“I can appreciate the feeling,” I said. “My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author. But look at it this way: inside stories seldom live up to one’s expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions.”
A raft of moonbeams … the ghostly torchlight, like fires in black-and-white films … stars … a few fine filaments of mist… I leaned upon the rail, I looked across the world … Utter silence held the night, the dream-drenched city, the entire universe from here. Distant things—the sea, Amber, Arden, Garnath, the Lighthouse of Cabra, the Grove of the Unicorn, my tomb atop Kolvir … Silent, far below, yet clear, distinct … A god’s eye view, I’d say, or that of a soul cut loose and drifting high … In the middle of the night…
Solipsism, I suppose, is where we have to begin—the notion that nothing exists but the self, or, at least, that we cannot truly be aware of anything but our own existence and experience.
Yet—yet there is a disturbing element in the picture. There is a place where the shadows go mad … When you purposely push yourself through layer after layer of Shadow, surrendering—again, purposely—a piece of your understanding every step of the way, you come at last to a mad place beyond which you cannot go. Why do this? In hope of an insight, I’d say, or a new game … But when you come to this place, as we all have, you realize that you have reached the limit of Shadow or the end of yourself—synonymous
Only the essentials here. Is Tir-na Nog’th a special sphere of Shadow in the real world, swayed by the promptings of the id—a full-sized projective test in the sky, perhaps even a therapeutic device? Despite the silver, I’d say, if this is a piece of the soul, the night is very dark … And silent…
I know where I must go, what I must do. Obvious now, though the logic which has seized me is not that of the waking mind.
A rock could jut beyond the coming tree, a morning glory twine and bell within that shrubby stand … There ought a patch of sky come clear, a wispy cloud upon it … Then let there be a fallen limb, a stair of fungus up its side … A scummed-over puddle … A frog … Falling feather, drifting seed … A limb that twists just so … Another trail upon our way, fresh-cut, deep-marked, past the place the feather should have fallen…
“Perhaps the Trumps would function again at the point of maximum congruity.”
