Jim’s Reviews > Wolf Solent > Status Update

I don't believe in any reality. I don't believe that this road and sky are real. I don't believe that the invisible worlds behind this road and sky are any more real than they are! Dreams within dreams! Everything is as I myself create it. I am the wretched demiurge of the whole spectacle.... Alone ... alone ... alone! If I create loveliness, there is loveliness. If I create monstrosity, there is monstrosity.

Nothing is against nature. That's the mistake people make; and it causes endless unhappiness.

It was as though he had suddenly emerged, by some hidden doorway, into a world entirely composed of vast, cool, silent-growing vegetation, a world where no men, no beasts, no birds, broke the mossy stillness; a world of sap and moisture and drooping ferns; a world of leaves that fell and fell for ever, leaf upon leaf....

Something about that silver on the sideboard, combined with his sister's news, threw a grey shadow over his own life. His mind sank down into a desolate acceptance of long years of stark endurance, the sort of endurance that wind-blown trees have to acquire when their branches become at last permanently bent, from bowing sideways, away from the north or east.

The [horses] looked so powerful and so contemptuous beside the stablemen who led them that Wolf, as he approached this procession, saw for a moment the whole human race in an inferior and ignominious light—saw them as some breed of diabolically-clever monkeys, who, by a debased trick of cunning, had been able to reduce to servitude animals far nobler and more godlike than themselves.

'I'm nothing,' he mumbled almost incoherently. 'I'm nothing. But don't you know,' he said, seizing Wolf's hand in his dirty, feverish fingers, 'don't you know that love sinks down into the roots of the whole world? Don't you know that there are ... levels ... in life ... that .... that ... defy nature?'