The Realm of the Imagination

The past week has been an inglorious slough of despond, but yesterday I hatched another series of virtuous resolves, and today I've been inordinately cheerful. Or perhaps it's simply that I've become used to the monotonous gloom of clouded Novemberish days.

As far as jobs, studies, etc. go, I've determined not to worry any more. I'll look for jobs on the Internet for about 15 minutes every day, with conscientious carefulness, and I think that's as much as anyone can expect. I've searched out lectures at the FU, and concerts at the UdK, and whenever the mood strikes, I will attend them. In time I hope I'll find some aim or purpose that will help me do these things, because the strongest motive I presently have to do anything is the fear of doing nothing.

Lately I've done nothing truly constructive, except finishing a journal of our trip to Hawaii in 2004, and writing two satires. The sad truth is that I find that I know so little of reality, especially present-day reality, that I can't write anything set in the present day. Perhaps I could have done so a year ago, but, since I've been keeping to our apartment nearly as devotedly as the Lady of Shalott kept to her tower, it won't work now. So I write satires of the online novels that I read, which gain some acerbity from the fact that I've become rather bored of them because of their lack of verisimilitude. But that brings to mind a passage in Patronage, where Alfred Percy (a lawyer) and others are discussing the actress Mlle. Clairon. She, having been criticized for having too much art and not enough naturalness, exclaimed, "De l'art! et que voudroit-on donc que j'eusse? Etois-je Andromaque? Etois-je Phèdre?" In short, I guess that fiction, however realistic it may be, is still fiction, and as such one cannot expect too much of it.

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Here is an excerpt from "A Gothic Heroine," my riff on the Gothic genre:

At that moment the stepmother came in. She had very white skin with startlingly carmine lips, and she wore a pointed black hat upon her raven tresses. Her age was a hundred and forty-two, but she looked thirty-five. In her hand she carried a goblet of pewter adorned with blood-red rubies, containing a bubbling green liquid that gave off an acrid odour and unearthly glow. “Take this, my dear,” she urged, “it is wine fresh from the cellar.”

“I am very sorry, dear mother,” returned the heroine mildly, “but you are aware that I only take wine with dinner.”

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An excerpt from "Lawson Granger: A Tale of the West," which is a satire on Westerns.

When he entered the parlour and had made himself known to the hostess [. . .], he espied “Betty Blank” (as he had been calling her to himself in his cogitations about her during the past eventful hours), and a joyous gleam illumined his lapis lazuli optics.

She caught sight of him too, as he made his way toward her, and smiled in return. She was just talking to one of Jake Butler’s ranchhands. When Granger reached her, the ranchhand took his leave, and she turned to the newcomer with excitement sparkling in her eyes.

“There are so many friendly people in this town!” she said. “And I’ve heard the most fascinating tales about a bad, powerful man who lives near here.”

“Mr. Butler?”

“I think that was the name. They say he will even come here this evening. Oh, I do wonder who he might be.” Suddenly she gave a little shriek and involuntarily gripped Granger’s arm, her eyes fixed on the doorway to the dining room. There stood a plump little man in a vile assortment of clothing, raven-black hair, a long drooping mustache that looked like the tail of an old horse that has been in a vicious fight with one of his kindred, glittering beady eyes, and a horribly forbidding scar slashed across his rubicund face. “Good heavens, he’s hideous!” she exclaimed.

“Ah don’t mean ter contradict you, ma’am, but that’s Jolly George, the lawyer an’ philanthr’pist. He’s the heart’n’soul of Amblesburgh’s church congregation, an’the most pop’lar man in the county.”

“Dear me,” said Betty in a fluttered voice.

“There’s Butler,” Granger told her after a few awkward moments.

Betty gaped in the direction of his gaze. The target of it was a well-dressed man of medium size, with mild brown eyes and a delightfully fuzzy, neatly trimmed brown beard, and pleasantly protruding ears that gave him a boyish air. “Surely you don’t mean him? Why, he’s so . . . civilized. He talked to me just now, and he was simply a dear!”

“Well, that’s him. ‘Black-heart Butler’ -- that’s what we call ’im. But Mrs. Buckworth and others ask’im to their parties an’ such ‘cause they like that he’s rich and distinguished-like.”