The Mountains of Instead

  LITTLE LESSONS FROM THE MASTERS: PART TWO First, one from the now nearly forgotten novelist Peter DeVries, a onetime favorite of mine:   There is nothing for fiction to do but to return to narrative, as there is nothing for a drunk to do but go home.   I copied this next from – I believe – Molly Lefebvre’s marvelous biography Coleridge: A Bondage of Opium.     It’s from a notebook; he’s addressing himself:   My dear fellow!   never be ashamed of scheming! -- you can't think of living less than 4,000 years, and that would nearly suffice for your present schemes.   To be sure, if they go on in the same ratio to the performance, then a small difficulty arises; but never mind! look on the bright side always and die in a dream!   And from a Coleridge journal: The common end of all narrative, nay, of all, poems is to convert a series into a whole:   to make those events, which in real or imagined History, move in a strait Line, ass...

  March 28: In a large crowd (one of those conference crowds I = m frequently in now in dreams) walking through woods on their way from one meeting place to another. We passed over a border without my knowing, and I had no passport to get back B only a damp and   illegible ID card.   Then at an airline desk asking my daughter if she had her passport. Trouble, canceled and delayed flights.   I am driving with Ralph my agent through a Midwestern city at evening B his kindly, courtly Chinese dream-assistant telling me that the bill for the car, which L had rented, would be $800. March 30: No memory of the part where I lost something or suffered some setback   B but then out on the usual dark city streets.   Saw a young, tough girl driving a crazy three-wheeled a motorcycle B admired her toughness and skill.   But she was going too fast on the potholed road, wouldn = t stop, finally lost control and was flung out onto the street.   ...

  Long ago, it was common to keep a copybook – a blank book meant only for copying out bits of wisdom or beauty gleaned from writing.   These are now kept digitally, and often shared with the world as soon as gathered.   I kept, for a couple of years, an actual blank book in which I wrote things in my reading that struck me, since in those days I was learning (or attempting to learn) how to be a writer.    I still have that copybook, and I’ll share the quotes having direct (or indirect) application to the arts and crafts of writing. When that little book was full it was a new age, and I recorded them on the computer. Maybe they will be useful to you.   I think they were to me, though it may be that I mostly just admired them, or nodded at how true they seemed.     The first is from Edith Wharton, prolific and hardworking author ( The Age of Innocence , The House of Mirth) writing at the end of her career, in 1934:     ...

 DREAMLIFE 2 These posts are all drawn from a dream diary I kept on and off from 2008 until 2014, but largely from the last two years.  I discovered the diary recently and read dream accounts that I had forgotten (and some that I remembered.  I'll post here the ones I think are amusing or weird, or that exhibit some condition of Story.  None were or have been altered.  Here's one that carries (for me) a glimpse of a future I hadn't yet envisioned: April 24: Turning into my driveway I felt I had driven over something, but couldn = t be sure.  I got out and looked underneath, and saw a crow had  got entangled under there. It came out, shaken and hurt but not badly.  I tried to urge it to go into the garage, where I would care for it, and  nurse it back to help.  I was secretly delighted at this chance.  The crow had meanwhile grown considerably larger, buzzard-sized.  I did get it to go into the garage, and we began a conversatio...

  DREAMLIFE I find that as I get older (and older) I am unable to remember my dreams, or to remember only a few brief parts, which I then immediately lose.   This is painful; on waking I can sense the flavor of dreaming so to speak, but retain nothing of it.   Age brings so many losses, small and large, that this one shouldn’t particularly distress me, but it does. Then lately I found a notebook in which from early 2008 to early 2014 I recorded dreams that I found to be intriguing or puzzling or outlandish in some way or another. I posted a few of these in my old LiveJournal, now unrecoverable.   But having the book again tempts me to set out a few for amusement or the general interest in dream-life.   They won’t be in time order, nor appear often.    One from August 2008: I was living with, or was member of, a Latino family in an apartment.   We were talking, a middle-aged man and children, when I saw smoke arising from the floor below, betwe...

  TIME IN FICTION In the early 20 th Century a famous professor at Harvard College claimed that all the reading that a first-rate mind needed could be fitted into a single five-foot bookshelf.   A publisher took him up on it, and the resulting “Harvard Classics” (everywhere known as “The Five Foot Shelf”) was hugely popular, published in several editions.   Christopher Beha, now editor-i-cheif at Harpers magazine, read his way through the whole Harvard Five Foot Shelf and lived to tell the tale (just barely, though not because of the reading -- the story's in his book The Whole Five Feet ).   Beha, after consuming all of those, went on to read all of the auxiliary Shelf of fiction (which was excluded from the original), and from Fielding's Tom Jones , the first in the series, he quotes this: My reader then is not to be surprized if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the tim...

     WALKING MEDITATION I began meditating three or four years ago without expectations, and many insights and lots of peaceful time were a part of that process.  In particular I began "walking meditation" (which when I first heard of it I supposed meant devotees walking together around a space with eyes closed, but no it waasn't like that). The walking meditation is a walk: it can be long or short, here or there, slow or not.  I'd walked for years around my small town, which is furnis hed with hills of various steepness, roads that pass beneath elder trees and past dwellings and meadows.  In all that walking, though, I rarely if ever noticed a phenomenon that I now enjoy, and that is a constant in my "practice" if that's what I do. It's the way that trees, especially in groups and in full leaf, seem to slide aside as you pass them and reveal the group beyond, only to close again when the road takes a turn the other way.  It's the commonest thing...