Forrest’s Reviews > The Hill of Dreams > Status Update

To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.

I am beginning to think that no one, NO ONE can map out a dreamlike vision like Machen. I am immersed in his worlds in a way I have not felt in a very, very long time. Time stops as I'm reading this book, and I am wont to lazily wander, without direction, and without a care in the world. It is an amazing, hypnotizing place to get lost and terrifying when one realizes the implications of being lost therein.

Lucian's self-exile and denial of all sociality ironically has the seed in it (through his experience) of a great artistic work. By his distancing himself, but observing sociality, without engaging in it, he preserves his time and efforts for his art, while gaining (painful) insight that informs his work. This is, to some extent, the writer's quandry. To be or to write, but one must see being to write.

What did the woman see? Lucian's inability to comprehend the reason for the horror of the woman who had looked st him and cried out is the true horror. Something about himself, something terrifying to others, is being hidden from him.

Machen picks at the emotional scabs of the difficulties presented by writing, not by "writer's block" but by the frequently returning dis-satisfaction that inevitably occurs after one has found some success in writing. It's a harrowing place where each writer has to confront their own inadequacies and weaknesses. Writing is, more often than not, painful. I'm in the midst of that myself right now, in fact.

Again, I wonder how much of Machen is in Lucian. The writerly process, with all its frustration and wonder, can only be known by doing, and Machen waxes eloquent (yet sinply) when writing about Lucian's writing.

Lucian's response to Annie Morgan's marriage is commendable and more positive than the lovelost feelings I've had when broken-hearted. He viewed it all, from their relationship's beginning to end, as a sort of blessing, rather than a curse, that opened up doors to whole new worlds for him. I need to meditate on this (though I'm quite happily married now), on how to turn heartache into advantage. I admire Lucian.

So far, some of the most exquisite sustained writing I've read. No wonder Lovwcraft was so enamored of Machen.

Machen's Lucian here falls into reveries that are both physically and spiritually synesthetic. Differentiating between smell and symbol, fact and fantasy, has become nearly impossible, if not for Lucian's intentional forays back and forth over the borders of physical reality and dream. Machen's writing is a heady concoction.

Lucian is undergoing a transformation, almost as if he has lost a part of himself or traded a part of himself for something else. Aren't life's most bitter and sweet experiences like that, an exchange of innocence for knowledge? Every man an Adam, every woman an Eve?