The Great Game

"About these matters I do not know. How should I? But I think that
all of us take part in a moving and a shifting and a reasoned using
of the things which are Koshchei's, a using such as we do not
comprehend, and are not fit to comprehend."

"That is possible," said Jurgen: "but, none the less--!"

"It is as a chessboard whereon the pieces move diversely: the
knights leaping sidewise, and the bishops darting obliquely, and the
rooks charging straightforward, and the pawns laboriously hobbling
from square to square, each at the player's will. There is no
discernible order, all to the onlooker is manifestly in confusion:
but to the player there is a meaning in the disposition of the
pieces."

"I do not deny it: still, one must grant--"

"And I think it is as though each of the pieces, even the pawns, had
a chessboard of his own which moves as he is moved, and whereupon he
moves the pieces to suit his will, in the very moment wherein he is
moved willy-nilly."

"You may be right: yet, even so--"

"And Koshchei who directs this infinite moving of puppets may well
be the futile harried king in some yet larger game."

"Now, certainly I cannot contradict you: but, at the same time--!"

"So goes this criss-cross multitudinous moving as far as thought can
reach: and beyond that the moving goes. All moves. All moves
uncomprehendingly, and to the sound of laughter. For all moves in
consonance with a higher power that understands the meaning of the
movement. And each moves the pieces before him in consonance with
his ability. So the game is endless and ruthless: and there is
merriment overhead, but it is very far away."

"Nobody is more willing to concede that these are handsome fancies,
Mother Sereda. But they make my head ache..."

--from Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell.

Encounter With The Brown Man

Early in the following morning Jurgen left Cameliard, traveling toward Carohaise, and went into the Druid forest there, and followed Merlin's instructions.

"Not that I for a moment believe in such nonsense," said Jurgen: "but it will be amusing to see what comes of this business, and it is unjust to deny even nonsense a fair trial."

So he presently observed a sun-browned brawny fellow, who sat upon the bank of a stream, dabbling his feet in the water, and making music with a pipe constructed of seven reeds of irregular lengths. To him Jurgen displayed, in such a manner as Merlin had prescribed, the token which Merlin had given. The man made a peculiar sign, and rose. Jurgen saw that this man's feet were unusual.

Jurgen bowed low, and he said, as Merlin had bidden: "Now praise be to thee, thou lord of the two truths! I have come to thee, O most wise, that I may learn thy secret. I would know thee, [...] I would know thee for what thou art."

The brown man answered: "I am everything that was and that is to be. Never has any mortal been able to discover what I am."

Then this brown man conducted Jurgen to an open glen, at the heart of the forest.

"Merlin dared not come himself, because," observed the brown man, "Merlin is wise. But you are a poet. So you will presently forget that which you are about to see, or at worst you will tell pleasant lies about it, particularly to yourself."

"I do not know about that," says Jurgen, "but I am willing to taste any drink once. What are you about to show me?"

The brown man answered: "All."

So it was near evening when they came out of the glen. It was dark now, for a storm had risen. The brown man was smiling, and Jurgen was in a flutter.

"It is not true," Jurgen protested. "What you have shown me is a pack of nonsense. It is the degraded lunacy of a so-called Realist. It is sorcery and pure childishness and abominable blasphemy. It is, in a word, something I do not choose to believe. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

"Even so, you do believe me, Jurgen."

"I believe that you are an honest man and that I am your cousin: so there are two more lies for you."

The brown man said, still smiling: "Yes, you are certainly a poet, you who have borrowed the apparel of my cousin. For you come out of my glen, and from my candor, as sane as when you entered. That is not saying much, to be sure, in praise of a poet's sanity at any time. But Merlin would have died, and Merlin would have died without regret, if Merlin had seen what you have seen, because Merlin receives facts reasonably."

"Facts! sanity! and reason!" Jurgen raged: "why, but what nonsense you are talking! Were there a bit of truth in your silly puppetry this world of time and space and consciousness would be a bubble, a bubble which contained the sun and moon and the high stars, and still was but a bubble in fermenting swill! I must go cleanse my mind of all this foulness. You would have me believe that men, that all men who have ever lived or shall ever live hereafter, that even I am of no importance! Why, there would be no justice in any such arrangement, no justice anywhere!"

*****

"Make answer, you who chatter about justice! how if I slew you now," says the brown man,--"I being what I am?"

"Slay me, then!" says Jurgen, with shut eyes, for he did not at all like the appearance of things. "Yes, you can kill me if you choose, but it is beyond your power to make me believe that there is no justice anywhere, and that I am unimportant. For I would have you know I am a monstrous clever fellow. As for you, you are either a delusion or a god or a degraded Realist. But whatever you are, you have lied to me, and I know that you have lied, and I will not believe in the insignificance of Jurgen."

Chillingly came the whisper of the brown man: "Poor fool! O shuddering, stiff-necked fool! and have you not just seen that which you may not ever quite forget?"

"None the less, I think there is something in me which will endure. I am fettered by cowardice, I am enfeebled by disastrous memories; and I am maimed by old follies. Still, I seem to detect in myself something which is permanent and rather fine. Underneath everything, and in spite of everything, I really do seem to detect that something. What role that something is to enact after the death of my body, and upon what stage, I cannot guess. When fortune knocks I shall open the door. Meanwhile I tell you candidly, you brown man, there is something in Jurgen far too admirable for any intelligent arbiter ever to fling into the dustheap. I am, if nothing else, a monstrous clever fellow: and I think I shall endure, somehow. Yes, cap in hand goes through the land, as the saying is, and I believe I can contrive some trick to cheat oblivion when the need arises," says Jurgen, trembling, and gulping, and with his eyes shut tight, but even so, with his mind quite made up about it. "Of course you may be right; and certainly I cannot go so far as to say you are wrong: but still, at the same time--"

"Now but before a fool's opinion of himself," the brown man cried, "the Gods are powerless. Oh, yes, and envious, too!"

*****

Jurgen went in a tremble to the Cathedral of the Sacred Thorn in Cameliard. All night Jurgen prayed there, not in repentance, but in terror. For his dead he prayed, that they should not have been blotted out in nothingness, for the dead among his kindred whom he had loved in boyhood, and for these only.

--from Jurgen, by James Branch Cabell.

Storisende's Story's End

As I placed the final (and, paradoxically, the first) volume on the shelf with its fellows, I half-expected a dusty, sepia-toned ghost to appear, smelling of cigarette smoke and ink, and reward me with an ironic glance at my achievement. For I had at long last attained the consummation of my dream to own a complete (if mismatched) set of the Storisende Edition of The Works of James Branch Cabell.
I have written elsewhere of my acquisition several years ago of an incomplete edition, lacking only Volume I, Beyond Life, and Volume IX, Gallantry, for $200 (complete sets were going for about $500). Although I had periodically checked eBay and Amazon, I never found copies of either as loose volumes in the necessary binding. I more or less resigned myself to merely owning them in the lesser Kalki edition. In expectation of my tax return this year, I was making a wish list of what I wanted to get, and the thought crossed my mind to check again. And there they were, going for $20 each, with shipping and handling. This is not my set, but this is what it more or less looks like:
I got Gallantry first. It is an ex-library copy, and as such carries the usual marks as well as Cabell's name in white on the spine. It is slightly faded and has a bit of a torn page where the bar-code was apparently removed, but is otherwise in good shape. Beyond Life was next, and it too carried the marks of use as small speckles of white paint on the spine and light pencil notations on the inside. I hardly mind as these show the books were actually used and appreciated; some of the volumes in my incomplete edition had not even been cut. And of course both books have the neat pencil autographs of James Branch Cabell himself, attesting to its brief but personal contact with their author.

So I can check off another item on my private internal literary bucket list, although this one is more about collecting than reading; I long ago read and enjoyed both. Indeed I am still digesting them, as Cabell is a writer who repays multiple readings and cogitation. But now I may (if I wish) do it in the fabled Storisende Edition, and that, to me, is a satisfying and comfortable thought.

The Devil His Due

"None the less," observes Jurgen [a pawnbroker speaking to a monk], "it does not behoove God-fearing persons to speak with disrespect of the divinely appointed Prince of Darkness. To your further confusion, consider this monarch's industry! Day and night you may detect him toiling at the task Heaven set him. That is a thing that can be said of few communicants and of no monks. Think, too, of his fine artistry, as evidenced in all the perilous and lovely snares of this world, which it is your business to combat, and mine to lend money upon! Why, but for him we would both be vocationless! Then, too, consider his philanthropy, and deliberate how insufferable would be our case if you and I, and all our fellow parishioners, were to-day hobnobbing with other beasts in the Garden which we pretend to desiderate on Sundays! To arise with swine and lie down with the hyena?--Oh, intolerable!"

--from Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell.

Creator's Quandary

"I find my country an inadequate place to live," says Horvendile. "Oh, many persons live there happily enough! or, at worst, they seem to find the prizes and the applause of my country worth striving for whole-heartedly. But there is that in some of us which gets no exercise there; and we struggle blindly, with impotent yearning, to gain outlet for great powers which we know that we possess, even though we do not know their names. And so, we dreamers wander at adventure to Storisende--oh, and into more perilous realms sometimes!--in search of a life that will find employment for every faculty we have. For life in my country does not engross us utterly. We dreamers waste there at loose ends, waste futilely. All which we can ever see and hear and touch there, we dreamers dimly know, is at best but a portion of the truth, and is possibly not true at all. Oh, yes! it may be that we are not sane; could we be sure of that, it would be a comfort. But, as it is, we dreamers only know that life in my country does not content us, and never can content us. So we struggle, for a tiny dear-bought while, into other and fairer-seeming lands in search of--we know not what! And after a little--after a little we must go back into my country and live there as best we may."

--from The Cream of the Jest (1927), by James Branch Cabell.

Frank Papers From Frank C. Pape

Some of the line drawings from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1921) by English artist Frank Cheyne Pape (there should be an accent over that final 'e': and it's pronounced paw-PAY). Pape had previously done more romantic pictures for collections of fairy tales and the like, but after the witty and accomplished work he did for Cabell's books he was tapped to do similar drawings for authors like Suetonius and Anatole France and Rabelais, writers who were deemed at the time to be ribald or dangerous, but whose books nowadays would hardly quicken a pulse. Pape, who was born in 1878, did little work after the Forties, and died in 1972.

95-Year-Old-Words

"Indisputably the most striking defect of this modern American literature is the fact that the production of anything at all resembling literature is scarcely anywhere apparent. Innumerable printing-presses , instead, are turning out a vast quantity of reading-matter, the candidly recognized purpose of which is to kill time, and which--it has been asserted, though perhaps too sweepingly,--ought not to be vended over book-counters, but rather in drug-stores along with the other narcotics.



"It is begging the question to protest that the class of people who a generation ago read nothing now at least read novels, and to regard this as a change for the better. By a similar logic it would be more wholesome to breakfast off laudanum than to omit the meal entirely. The nineteenth century, in fact, has produced in America the curious spectacle of a reading-public with essentially non-literary tastes. Formerly, better books were published, because they were intended for persons who turned to reading through a natural bent of mind; whereas the modern American novel of commerce is addressed to us average people who read, when we read at all, in violation of every innate instinct.



"Such grounds as yet exist for hopefulness on the part of those who cordially care for valid writing are to be found elsewhere than in the crowded market-places of fiction, where genuine intelligence panders on all sides to ignorance and indolence. The phrase may seem to have no very civil ring; but reflection will assure the fair-minded that two indispensable requisites nowadays of a pecuniarily successful novel are, really, that it make no demand upon the reader's imagination, and that it rigorously refrain from assuming its readers to possess any particular information on any subject whatever. The author who writes over the head of the public is the most dangerous enemy of his publisher,--and the most insidious as well, because so many publishers are in private life interested in literary matters, and would readily permit this personal foible to influence the exercise of their vocation were it possible to do so upon the preferable side of bankruptcy.



"But publishers, among innumerable other conditions, must weigh the fact that no novel which does not deal with modern times is ever really popular among the serious-minded. It is difficult to imagine a tale of action developed under the rule of the Caesars or the Merovingians as being treated as more than a literary hors d'oevure. We purchasers of 'vital' novels know nothing about the period, beyond a hazy association of it with the restrictions of the school-room; our sluggish imaginations instinctively rebel against the exertion of forming any notion of such a period; and all the human nature that exists even in serious-minded persons is stirred up to resentment against the book's author for presuming to know more than a potential patron.* The book, in fine, simply irritates the serious-minded person; and she--for it is only women who willingly braves the terrors of the department-stores, where most of our new books are bought nowadays,--quite naturally puts it aside in favor of some keen and daring study of American life that is warranted to grip the reader. So, modernity of scene is everywhere necessitated as an essential qualification for a book's being discussed at the literary evenings of the local woman's club; and modernity of scene, of course, is almost always fatal to the permanent worth of fictitious narrative."



*"Since this was written we average-novel-readers have formed a taste for 'modernization'; and we have taken kindly enough to romantic old legends once they had been burlesqued with the pallidly coy humorousness of a schoolmaster addressing a class of nubile girls. Even so, the principle remains. We yet resolutely rebel against forming a notion of any unfamiliar period; and we accept Camelot or Troy or Eden as the scene of our reading-matter only upon the assumption that the place was inhabited by twentieth century persons leading twentieth century lives."



--James Branch Cabell, 1916, from "Auctorial Induction," The Certain Hour.



One can see how these words can apply, with very little change, to literature today, especially (to my mind) so-called Fantasy Fiction. Mr. Cabell, in the footnote, is of course obliquely referring to his own Poictesme "romances."

Miramon Lluagor

MIRAMON LLUAGOR: In James Branch Cabell's extensive work The Biography of Manuel, Miramon Lluagor is one of the Leshy (in Russian folklore a type of forest spirit, but in the context of the Biography one of the powers, "neither human nor immortal", in the pantheon of Poictesme, Cabell's imaginary French province. He is "lord of the nine kinds of sleep and prince of the seven madnesses. He lives in mythic splendor at the top of the gray mountain called Vraidex, where he contrives all manner of illusions, and, in particular, designs the dreams of men." He has a "rather arbitrary half-brother," Grandfather Death, "a dreadful realist" compared to the ornate artistry of Miramon's dreams, and lord of the tenth kind of sleeping.

In about 1230, Miramon Lluagor inadvertently started the pig herder Manuel on his road to becoming Count of Poictesme when the magician stole away Gisele, the daughter of Count Demetrios D'Arnaye, and took her to his Doubtful Palace to be his wife. There he found that although Gisele was a beautiful and charming girl of just the type that he had always fancied for a wife, she had "a strong will in her white bosom, and a tireless tongue in her glittering head," and that he did not "equally admire all four of these possessions." Since it is the law of the Leshy that they cannot relinquish their prey unless they have been conquered, and since he cannot be vanquished except by the resistless magical sword Flamberge, Miramon visits Manuel incognito, giving him the enchanted blade and the idea to rescue the girl and become a hero.

Manuel journeys to the Doubtful Palace, overcoming the dangerous dream-designs that guard the way with the help of the plain Niafer, Gisele's maid-servant. There he discovers that the mild-mannered, snub-nosed stranger who gave him the sword is Miramon, the dreadful magician. Gisele enters, and she, who has grown to love her husband, decides not to upset the status quo, and finding that Manuel has fallen in love with Niafer, trades him her servant-girl for Flamberge. Miramon, who in contemplating Manuel's choice of a plain, swart, and not very clever girl, realizes that he really has a superior wife, and finds how much he truly has come to love her. He throws the couple a magnificent betrothal pageant of fantasies and illusions, and sends them on their way.

Several years later it is Miramon who, hearing of Manuel's plight, comes to his aid, brokering his deal with the demiurge Horvendile and revealing to Manuel his destiny as Redeemer of Poictesme. The magician revives ten mighty but forgotten deities out of the dust heap of his old designs, and sends them against the Northmen who are ravishing Poictesme, destroying in a single night what Manuel's troops have failed to eliminate with years of fighting. Thereafter Miramon serves Manuel as Seneschal of Gontaron and as a member of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion, and it was he who defeated the draug Thragnar and put upon him a detection and a hindrance.

When Manuel vanishes out of Poictesme, Miramon returns to the Doubtful Palace upon the back of a tame and elderly dragon, there to live in "the sedate seclusion appropriate to a veteran artist." He is accompanied by Gisele and his son Demetrios who, according to the Norns who weave the inexorable fates of the Leshy, is doomed to kill his father with Flamberge. Miramon is determined to spend what time remains to him by creating more of his dream designs, using colors such as "his white, which was the foam of the ocean made solid, and the black he had wrung from the burned bones of nine emperors...the yellow slime of Scyros, and crimson cinnabaris composed of the mingled blood of mastodons and dragons, and....the poisonous blue sand of Puteoli." Gisele, who is annoyed about leaving court life, is unsatisfied with Miramon's pursuit of art, and not slow in showing it, nor is she happy with Demetrios' and Miramon's fate.

Evasion of this fate seems possible when Miramon's friend Ninzian brings him the Bees of Toupan, which have the power to grant three wishes if one can release them. If Miramon can figure out how to do so, he can simply wish Flamberge away and thus become virtually immortal. Gisele, in dusting her husband's studio, accidentally discovers how to free the Bees, and inadvertent wishes are made that almost destroy the universe. Miramon must use the third wish to restore things to the way they were, and loses his chance for immortality.

In due course Demetrios kills Miramon, a deed of which he occasionally boasts to impress people; whether Miramon put up a fight at the end, or if he accepted it philosophically as was his wont, is unknown. But even that might not have been the absolute end of the magician. Years before when Manuel was in position to destroy him, there was this following exchange:

"I have but to sever the wicked head of this doomed magician from his foul body, and that will be the end of him--"

"No, no," says Miramon, soothingly, "I shall merely be turned into something else, which perhaps we had better not discuss. But it will not inconvenience me in the least, so do you not hold back out of mistaken kindness to me, but instead do you smite..."

So it is possible that somewhere, in some form, Miramon Lluagor is still weaving dreams and designing fantasies to vex the minds of men and disturb their sleep, and pursues the art of which he was a supreme master.

What Guivric Was Made Of: Favorite Quotes

"[Guivric] went onward, disquieted but unhindered. And in the gray anteroom beyond, were the progenitors of Guivric disporting themselves, each in the quaint manner of their bygone day, and talking with uneager and faded voices about old times.



"Since none of these ancestors had ever heard or thought of Guivric, they gave scant attention to him now. And to see them was upsetting, somehow. One of these strangers had Guivric's high thin nose, and another just his long thin hands, and another his prim mouth, and another his excellent broad shoulders. Guivric could recognize all these fragments of himself moving at random about the gray room. He knew that, less visibly but quite as really, his tastes and his innate aversions--his little talents and failings and out-of-date loyalties, his quickness at figures, his aptitude for drawing, his tendency to catch cold easily, and his liking for sweets and highly seasoned foods,--were all passing about this gray room.



"A compost of odds and ends had been patched together from these unheeding persons; that almost accidental patchwork was Guivric; the thought was humiliating. There was, he reflected, in this gray room another complete Guivric, only this other Guivric was not entire, but moved about in scattered fragments. That thought appeared, to a peculiarly self-centered person like Guivric, rather uncomfortable.



"So Guivric went beyond his ancestors. Without delay the proud man passed stiffly by the inconsiderate people whose casual amours had created him, and had given him life and all his qualities, without consulting his preferences or his convenience, or even thinking about him."



--from The Silver Stallion, by James Branch Cabell.

10 Books A Day: #131

All books are by James Branch Cabell and published by Robert M. McBride & Company.
Beyond Life
Gallantry
Figures Of Earth
The Silver Stallion
Domnei/The Music From Beyond The Moon
Chivalry
Jurgen
The Line Of Love
The High Place
Something About Eve
The Certain Hour
The Cords Of Vanity
From The Hidden Way/The Jewel Merchants
The Rivet In Grandfather's Neck
The Eagle's Shadow
The Cream Of The Jest/The Lineage Of Lichfield
Straws And Prayerbooks
Townsend Of Lichfield

James Branch Cabell (1879-1958) was an American writer from Richmond, Virginia, and an author of modest success until he was propelled into the limelight by having charges of obscenity levelled against his ninth novel, Jurgen. The notoriety that resulted gave an enormous boost to his sales, not only for Jurgen, but for all previous and subsequent books, and Cabell had to resign himself to being known as "the author of Jurgen." Although the court finally decided that the passages were too literary and ambiguous to be deemed indecent, the notoriety persisted. Cabell says he found himself importuned (by fans who could not distinguish between an author's work and his life) by young men with requests to be taught the Black Arts, and by young ladies with what he called "surprising suggestions."

Cabell enjoyed more than a faddish popularity, although the ballyhoo over the trial lent him much publicity. Mark Twain enjoyed his work, and indeed was reading Chivalry when he passed away. Critics and authors of the 1920's, among them H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, and Theodore Dreiser (although themselves now something of a faded crew) praised his craft and significance. Even an obscure pulp writer named Robert E. Howard wrote an appreciative review of Something About Eve. Encroaching age and the onset of World War II put Cabell back on the back burner, although he continued to write almost until his death, producing several books on historical Florida, where he spent his last years. He died in 1958, a relic of a more elegant age, of little use to the writing establishment of a brutally practical post-war era.

But the connoisseurs and practitioners of fantastic literature have long memories. The influence of Cabell was seen and felt in the works of James Blish, Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Lieber, Jack Vance, and Larry Niven. In the early Seventies Lin Carter introduced a new generation to Cabell's work by reprinting six of his novels in the Ballantine Books line of Adult Fantasy. This is where Neil Gaiman discovered him, and Cabell's style and themes can be seen throughout his work, especially in The Sandman and American Gods. It was the Adult Fantasy editions (under the new imprint of Del Rey Fantasy) that introduced me to Cabell in 1979 with The Silver Stallion.

Over the years I've developed a deepening interest in Cabell, picking up the odd volume here and there from used book stores, but always yearning for the complete Biography Of Manuel, as Cabell came to call the series of books linked by the lives of Manuel (the Count of Poictesme) and his heirs. These were gathered together and published in a uniform binding called the Storisende Edition, consisting of eighteen volumes, and released between 1927 and 1930 in limited numbers. This year I finally got an incomplete set (it lacks Beyond Life and Gallantry, which I was able to obtain in the slightly cheaper Kalki Editions) for about $200 (a complete set was going for about $500). These dark gray-green tomes now sit proudly on my shelves. Each is signed in pencil by James Branch Cabell, in small, neat letters. Some of these books have never been cut, so my eyes are the first in over eighty years to read them. Oddly enough, I'm finding the non-fantastic stories (like Townsend Of Lichfield and The Rivet In Grandfather's Neck) to be the most fascinating to read, both as a look at life in a small southern city at the turn of the century and as a sample of a style of writing now long extinct.

Book Count: 1562.

10 Books A Day: #87

Figures Of Earth...James Branch Cabell...Del Rey

The Silver Stallion...James Branch Cabell...Del Rey

Domnei...James Branch Cabell...Del Rey

Jurgen...James Branch Cabell...Avon

The High Place...James Branch Cabell...Del Rey

Something About Eve...James Branch Cabell...Del Rey

The Cream Of The Jest...James Branch Cabell...Del Rey

Stardust...Neil Gaiman...Spike

Neverwhere...Neil Gaiman...Harper Torch

Smoke And Mirrors...Neil Gaiman...Avon

Book Count: 1107.

A Cluster of Quotes on Books

"Jonathan still had a good bit of coin left after the purchase, and he considered that it would likely be folly of some sort to return upriver with too much money. They'd probably just get waylaid and robbed by highwaymen or goblins. Therefore, all things considered, it would be wise to spend most of the rest of his money on books. Few thieves, when you think about it, bother stealing books. They either don't go in much for reading or would have an impossible time carting away the books." ---James P. Blaylock, The Elfin Ship.

Felix Kennaston, an author, considers his Uncle Henry's inherited library:
"And besides,--so Kennaston's thoughts strayed at times--, these massed books, which his predecessor at Alcluid had acquired piecemeal through the term of a long life, were a part of that predecessor's personality. No other man would have gathered and have preserved precisely the same books, and each book, with varying forcefulness, had entered into his predecessor's mind and tinged it. These parti-colored books, could one but reconstruct the mosaic correctly, would give a candid portrait of "your Uncle Henry in Lichfield," which would perhaps surprise all those who had known old Henry Kennaston daily in the flesh. Of the fact that these were unusual books their present owner and tentative explorer had no doubt whatever. They were perturbing books." ---James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest.

"I spent the afternoon and evening...beginning to re-read The Well At The World's End. I was anxious to see whether the old spell still worked. It does--rather too well. This going back to books read at that age is humiliating: one keeps on tracing what are now quite big thing's in one's mental outfit to curiously small sources. I wonder how much even of my feeling for external nature comes out of the brief, convincing little descriptions of mountains and woods in this book." ---C. S. Lewis, All My Road Before Me.

This last quote in particular has been much in my mind lately, what with my remembrance of things past.