The White Road Quotes

“Beyond, he could glimpse high, tumescent hills of unnaturally perfect smoothness, each crowned with an ivory-coloured column of stone. Between the hills ran valleys dense with pallid vegetation. Bank upon bank of cloud hung frozen in a still, pale sky. Though his vantage point commanded great distance, some curious distortion of perspective rendered everything - near and far - equally sharp to the eye. And nowhere could he see a shadow.

It was as if he had stepped over the border of a wonderful and subtly disturbing illustration in some long-forgotten, childhood book. The land lay before him like a vast and awful glyph, waiting to be read, and he knew at once that he must go on, just a little further, or regret it all the days of his life.

"The White Road”
― Ron Weighell, The White Road

“He was walking one wet night through a desolate region of the City. A wagon trundled by, drenching his legs with a fine spray. He turned aside, and a maze of dingy streets opened before him. The sky between the slanting rooftops hung black as a slab of jet. Then a waning moon rode clear of the storm clouds.

He had penetrated an old commercial sector of the City where winding lanes lay lampless, flanked by dilapidated warehouses. Every window was boarded up or shattered; too many doorways opened onto musty darkness. With every turn of the black road the same scene lay revealed: row upon row of grey, sagging eaves; scarred and battered gates; rusting fences; sickle moons in every shallow remnant of the rain. He seemed to be shedding the present with every step, moving backwards through time. It seemed that he was acting out some part prearranged, utterly without will.

"The White Road”
― Ron Weighell, The White Road

“There was a dreadful logic here - so obvious he had overlooked it. The real need was for a different kind of book altogether, a book for the times. Very well then, he would explore that infernal map, transcribe its morbid cartography; record the tale of a realm that was at once a city and Hell and himself.

In this way Owen Maddock turned his back on the light and sought out the oracles that lurk in darkness.

A feverish energy possessed him. He laboured as never before upon his given work. Now he would strive to be obscure, to lead his readers by crooked paths, baffle them with indecipherable mysteries. There would no delicacy of style, only 'thunder at midnight'. Little by little there rose up before his inner eye a new vision to replace that of the White Road that had led him nowhere: a Kingdom of Darkness, a crepuscular domain of monstrous cults that chanted, to the tolling of iron bells and the beating of brazen gongs, unpronounceable demonic litanies. He must familiarise himself with every aspect of this world, its endless roll-calls of Hell, the spells by which the doors of the pit might be opened. He must cast in awful detail the laws by which tortures were administered.

He would write for days in a frenzy, his mind ranging on raven's wings through skies black as pitch.

"The White Road”
― Ron Weighell, The White Road

“In the days of his health and strength, Owen would have confidently refuted this picture of hopelessness, but he was tired and ill. His room now remained unheated most of the time and he was racked with coughs and ominous chest pains. In the long, miserable hours when sleep would not come, he found his eyes turning to that mouldy stain upon the wall, and he began to harbour dark thoughts.

What was all this talk of the soul anyway? It could not be weighed or measured; die surgeon never discovered it. In any case it could not grant insight into stock market prices, could create no visible wealth. Indeed, there were brilliant people with titles like 'professor', people whose name trailed endless letters, who even after the most rigorous deliberations, most elegant applications of logic, doubted that such a thing as the soul existed at all.

And after all, was not The City full of Smugsbys who possessed no discernible soul, yet lived after their fashion? The Great Mystery was nothing to them. They did not seek the Great Answer; they were not aware that there had ever been a Great Question! What business had he, a starving wretch, in seeking to nurture through his writings an invisible, odourless, weightless abstraction of dubious commercial value, when the very process merely drew attention away from the 'real' business of getting on?

"The White Road”
― Ron Weighell, The White Road

“But these were dreams - and very ambitious dreams - of the future. For the present, he wrote what he could and set about the pleasurable task of revealing his talents to the world.

To his mild surprise, the world remained singularly unimpressed.

'You have some excellent material here/ wrote one publisher, 'but our reader feels the presentation to be a little laborious, and consequently we do not... etc...'

Well, that was pretty much the story. Winter drew on; Owen eked out his remaining money on food and fuel, then learnt a little about hunger and cold.

One publisher took the trouble to send a list of reading, so that he might submit the kind of book they required, and he sought out the titles at the local library. He read with growing interest, and soon saw where he had gone wrong.

The field seemed to be held by a group of writers whose terse, taut style suggested the breathless delivery of some vital message, the gist of which seemed to be that man had a mean destiny and that all was for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. Owen was by this time so impoverished that he might have sought to share their generous publishing rights and big sales, but for the fact that he could not master the trick of seeing the Universe as a meaningless mistake, or the Human race as sick and soulless automata.

He could have joined another, minor school, who wove elegant references to myth and faery-tale into their novels. He was, after all, seeking to do the same. But to his amazement he found that they did so, not with the intention of suggesting that the apparently commonplace might be wonderful, but that the apparently wonderful was, after all, merely commonplace.

On a superficial reading they appeared to embody the ancient traditions in their works, but Owen, who could not get the knack of superficial reading, discerned that they were merely holding up a highly polished mirror to such subjects from a safe distance, producing as a result a diminished reflection, a perfect pigmy reversal of all that myth, legend and even homely folktales intended. While the ancient writers offered a simple, sometimes crude, or even ridiculous surface, beneath which the reader might discover unguessed levels of meaning, the work of the modern myth-mongers presented a clever, intricate and finely crafted surface, beneath which lay - nothing at all. And how could it have been otherwise, when true devotion to the Eternal Mysteries found no place in their hearts? There was no bedrock of belief.

So he went his own outmoded way, as the days grew colder and the cupboard became bare. He was not aware that his circumstances affected his state of mind, but an objective eye might then have discovered in his work - in the sombre pages of The Night Before Winter, for instance - a distinctly darker thread.
"The White Road”
― Ron Weighell, The White Road