Few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later, no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget, we will return.
He choose his road, but he kept looking back.
Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of theirwork. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever, to be the dwelling of man, we say, so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can.
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy. Also around bedtime was my singing time. I'd pace up and down the well-worn path in the dust of my rock singing all the show tunes I could remember, at the top of my voice too, with nobody to hear except the deer and the bear.
Writing os one of the most solitary activities in the world. Once every two years, I sit in front of my computer, I observe my soul's unknown ocean and I see a few islands - ideas which are developing and that are ready to be explored. And so I take my boat - its name is "Word" - and I choose to sail towards the closest of them. On the journey, I come across currents, winds and storms, but I go on rowing, growing more tired. I am conscious of being off route, of not having on the horizon the island I wanted to reach anymore. All the same there is no way of going back: I have to continue anyway, or I shall find myself lost amidst the ocean. At that moment a series of terrifying images cross my mind: I that spend the rest of my life talking of previous success, or sourly crticizing new writers for the simple fact of not having the courage of publishing any new material. But wasn't my dream that of being a writer? Therefore I must go on creating sentences, paragraphs, chapters and Wrtiting to exhaustion, without letting myself be paralized by success, by defeat, by traps along the way.
Shaken by such absurd thoughts, I find within myself a strength and courage of which I ignored the existence: they help me to adventure to the boundless side of my soul. I let myself be carried by the currents and I end up anchoring my boat in the proximity of the island to where I have been taken. I spend days and nights wrtiting what I see, asking myself why am I acting this way, repeating to myself every moment why this effort has become useless, that I have no nedd to prove anything to anyone, that I have already obtained what I wanted and a lot more of what I could possibly dream of.
The deeds were monstrous, but the doer--at least, the very effective one now on trial--was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither monstrous nor demonic.
I had been surrounded with fancied beings, with mere airy nothings conjured up by poetic power, yet which, to me, had all the charm of reality.
I can't die yet, doctor. Not yet. I have things to do. Afterwards I'll have a whole lifetime in which to die.
I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.
When we don't seem to think about nothing, acyually we think about what we care. The love is like gravity force: invisible and universal, like the physical one. Inevitably our heart, our eyes, our words, without realizing it end up there, on what we love, like the apple with the gravity.