A scrap I want to keep from p.304 of “Mr Shakespeare’s Bastard” by Richard B. Wright:
“But what must have scored my imagination that December afternoon so long ago–for over the years the Scarfes, both father and son, have returned to me in dreams–was the depth of that old man’s misery: a life of toil at a trade he despised, an unfaithful wife and a wayward son, blindness and a palsied hand and penury towards the end. Job himself had scarcely endured more. And looking at Martin Scarfe in our silence together, I remember wondering how I could avoid such unhappiness. Such thoughts are apt to trouble us most in the hours of a sleepness night, and then with daybreak vanish like the mist across a meadow. But I have carried such thoughts from that room in Whitechapel over all these years and with them attendant questions. How may we find some measure of contentment in this life? Or should we look instead to whatever lies beyond the grave? And if we fail the test, as preachers are so fond of prophesying? What then? Damnation?
I really love the simile of thoughts vanishing like mist across a meadow at daybreak. Beautiful.
This is a good book. A book about words. A book about fictional characters. Do they not exist, or do they exist in the pages? Which then leads the reader to wonder ‘do characters live beyond the book, in the minds of all the people that have ‘read’ them?’ (This reader, at least.) And then I got to thinking about Stephen King’s ‘Dark Half’.