EBOOK
About
The story you are thinking of begins with a train. This train will arrive; it will not arrive, everything follows from this. You have in your head an image, this image, and one or two facts: the train, a foot. Not invention, you remind yourself, but selection. So, the train, a steam train; and the foot, a mechanical foot. You will begin with what you know and more will come to you. The train, the foot, the aftermath. It begins with the train, with the temporal trick that means the train arrives in the town of faraway Mither Harbour even as it leaves St. William's Arch. It is autumn, it is dusk. These are the details you must fill in. Was the night mild? Was the wait long? Did a station lamp flicker? Everything in this story begins with the train; with the brute fact of it, the sequence of it, the timing of it; time accounted for and time lost. It was autumn. It was dusk. It was mild. It had rained. The platform was busy. The station lamps were due for topping up. Were the signal lights in order? Were the brakemen drunk? In the aftermath, this will all matter. The stitching of events will be picked at and examined. Where. When. How. Why. So much causal netting to be carefully unsnarled.
You have learned the knack of splitting consciousness. You have the train before you and you distribute across it a set of figures: a girl, a bereft young man, an inventor and his drudge. To these figures you apportion stories: a mercy killing, a drawn-out suicide, and exquisite machines. That these figures and these stories are connected you take for granted; you can point to theme, trajectory, origin point. You observe that these stories share a furniture and you give examples: blankets, sidekicks, wax, and artificial limbs. There are resonances, echoes, things that come back. Characters recycled through different parts. An isthmus of shared plot. And yet — And yet, it troubles you. The overall picture. The connections between connections. Provenance — it is a question of provenance, where the stories and their elements came from and how they fit.
You pause. Check your notes. You've gone over and over it. You'll get there.
So: the girl, the bereft young man, the inventor and his drudge. Mercy killing, suicide, exquisite machines. And you, of
You have learned the knack of splitting consciousness. You have the train before you and you distribute across it a set of figures: a girl, a bereft young man, an inventor and his drudge. To these figures you apportion stories: a mercy killing, a drawn-out suicide, and exquisite machines. That these figures and these stories are connected you take for granted; you can point to theme, trajectory, origin point. You observe that these stories share a furniture and you give examples: blankets, sidekicks, wax, and artificial limbs. There are resonances, echoes, things that come back. Characters recycled through different parts. An isthmus of shared plot. And yet — And yet, it troubles you. The overall picture. The connections between connections. Provenance — it is a question of provenance, where the stories and their elements came from and how they fit.
You pause. Check your notes. You've gone over and over it. You'll get there.
So: the girl, the bereft young man, the inventor and his drudge. Mercy killing, suicide, exquisite machines. And you, of