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desperanceI wasn't going to work today. But Karen has gone to the writing group, and I have stayed at home; I have lit the grill and set pork to cook slowly under a marinade, with potatoes in the ashes; I am reading Lymond at last, but my conscience won't let me read all day unless I'm sick; and it was five o'clock and I wanted wine, and that same damn conscience makes rules about that too, I am seldom allowed to drink alone unless I'm working.
So I'm working, already. I'm reading through the extant twenty pages of GERMINAL, the novella that pairs up with ROTTEN ROW (which you can buy! from the publisher, here or from your local Brazilian river or specialist bookstore or otherwise!) - and I just hit this bit, and I can't remember if I quoted it before but I like it anyway, so here it is (possibly again):
There was only one way from here. Across a bland open space to the upthrust of the ’Chute in all its isolated splendour, looking almost deliberately alien in this landscape, a static rocket-ship. Truly it could do nothing but what it did, it could mean nothing else, only here is a way off this world, if you choose to take it. If you dare to, if you need to, if you want.
It wasn’t need, so much. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. But dare, oh yes: he dared it. Here he was, stepping through the petal doorway - too narrow for two, this was a journey you had to take alone - and glancing up, inevitably, to where the high curves of the rising ’Chute vanished into a blur of something that was not quite colour and not quite sky, the only glimpse he would ever have of that other mystery, the physics that rivalled even humanity in its wayward inexplicability. Scientists were artists now, physicists must needs be poets, and hence misunderstood. Travel was an intimate kind of serial divorce.
So I'm working, already. I'm reading through the extant twenty pages of GERMINAL, the novella that pairs up with ROTTEN ROW (which you can buy! from the publisher, here or from your local Brazilian river or specialist bookstore or otherwise!) - and I just hit this bit, and I can't remember if I quoted it before but I like it anyway, so here it is (possibly again):
There was only one way from here. Across a bland open space to the upthrust of the ’Chute in all its isolated splendour, looking almost deliberately alien in this landscape, a static rocket-ship. Truly it could do nothing but what it did, it could mean nothing else, only here is a way off this world, if you choose to take it. If you dare to, if you need to, if you want.
It wasn’t need, so much. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. But dare, oh yes: he dared it. Here he was, stepping through the petal doorway - too narrow for two, this was a journey you had to take alone - and glancing up, inevitably, to where the high curves of the rising ’Chute vanished into a blur of something that was not quite colour and not quite sky, the only glimpse he would ever have of that other mystery, the physics that rivalled even humanity in its wayward inexplicability. Scientists were artists now, physicists must needs be poets, and hence misunderstood. Travel was an intimate kind of serial divorce.