Tonight, he began to think of words, words came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems, "The Death Mask," "The Fairfax Wall," "A Number of Cats." He could hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn't yet know, but which was his own. The poems were not careful observations, nor yet incantations, nor yet reflections on life and death, though they had elements of all these. He added another, "Cats' Cradle," as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves. Tomorrow he would buy a new notebook and write them down. Tonight he would write down enough, the mnemonics.
He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.
A.S. Byatt, 515-516
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1 comments:
Ooh, I love that book. It's one of my favorite favorites. I just wrote a paper comparing it to Don Quijote. Don't know if that was a good idea or not, but I've always wanted to write a paper about it and figured I'd grab the first opportunity that presented itself.
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