A Multitude of Drops

First of all, I apologize for my long absence. School does not leave me much time to write or to read, outside of what I do in class. Now that summer has started I will hopefully have some time to do some reading of Ghostwritten. It’s a hell of a lot better than the drivel that is Maria Doria Russell’s The Sparrow which I am currently halfway through. However, I haven’t dedicated the time quite yet to give that sonufabitch Neil Brose the attention he deserves. So I’m going to talk a little bit about epigraphs, more specifically about Ghostwritten’s epigraph and how it is a dead giveaway of the theme/Central Narrative Thread(CNT)/etc….

I’ve only personally seen epigraphs in books that are attempting to be literary. Maybe that’s literary snobbery, after all some books that claim to be “literary” are little more than the author preaching through flimsily constructed mouthpieces (I’m looking at you Atlas Shrugged). However, despite their various flaws I think literary books do all attempt to engage with a larger set of ideas. Which is, to quote GRRM out of context “is their great glory and their great tragedy.” All literary books, without strong enough characters or plot, run the risk of turning out like Atlas Shrugged.

Epigraphs are a way to begin this discourse by citing and suggesting an expansion or a response to the ideas put forth in previous work. Citing your sources, as you will. Epigraphs suggest that the author has done their due diligence and read widely. Usually the book is better for it (guess which book does not have an epigraph :) ). Oftentimes however, the epigraph kind of gives away the chase: it can make the point of the book VERY apparent, although perhaps I am speaking with reread bias. Let’s take a look at a couple examples and then I’ll dive in to what I think Ghostwritten’s epigraph is all about.

The celestial spheres endlessly resound.

But an instant is invincible in memory.

It comes back in the middle of the night. Who are those holding torches

So that what is long past occurs in full light

-Czesław Miłosz

This is an epigraph from Guy Gavriel Kay’s newest book A Brightness Long Ago. The text of the epigraph itself is from a Czesław Miłosz  poem called “The Master”. The poem is about an old musician/composer remembering some sinful event from his past, and remarking on how clear it seems and how he is glad he remembers in it. In A Brightness Long Ago, the main character Danino is also stuck in the mists of the past. He is old, serving on the council in Seressa (analog of Venice) as an important noble, but it is this event from his youth, the meeting of two mercenary leaders who engage in a struggle that ends up being pointless, is the thing he remembers. This epigraph tells us that it is this act of memory that we should be focusing on: the how he remembers and the why, not the what.

TRIPITAKA: Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha?

WU-KONG: You can walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you become young again; and even after going through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it difficult to reach the place where you want to go. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your will, the Buddha-nature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in your memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain.

-The Journey to the West

This is an epigraph from Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt. The Epigraph is from the 16th century Ming Chinese novel The Journey to the West. The former tells the tale of an alternate history in which the black plague wiped out the entire population of Europe. The latter is a Chinese folktale chronicling the seeking of enlightenment by pilgrims traveling the Western regions of China (i.e. India and Central Asia). Robinson’s novel focuses on two things: a world and a group of reincarnating individuals, both of which seek to come to some kind of balance. In the Bardo, a limbo-like state between incarnations, the characters find themselves and the world in a state of anarchy. China is first too powerful and then the Arab states and so on and so forth. The reincarnated characters, each delineated by the starting letter of their name, also swing back and forth on the pendulum. From coward to scientist, from hero to murderer. It is only in the chapter entitled “Window Kang”, in which the title character reflects on the best years of her life being those of “rice and salt”, i.e. the ordinary, hectic child-filled years of her life, in which enlightenment begins to be achieved.

...And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?

“Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

-Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

And now finally Ghostwritten. I have not read The Bridge of San Luis Rey (it’s on my reading list I swear), but the central event of the novel is a bridge collapsing in Lima, Peru which kills seven people. Brother Juniper, a local monk, takes it upon himself to find out these people are and perhaps see the workings of the hand of God in their deaths. I have not read the book, so I do not know the intricacies of the ending, but the Abbess of the monastery: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

Ghostwritten also focuses on the question of the existence of the hand of God. In some ways Mitchell comes to the same conclusion as Wilder. So many of the characters make the decisions they make because they love. Yet like all effective authors, Mitchell goes beyond merely affirming the ideas espoused by the epigraph. First of all there are the non-corporeals, an invisible force that influences our decisions in inexplicable ways. Then, more importantly, the CNT is a train hurtling towards the creation of the super intelligent AI Zookeeper and the destruction of the human race by a comet. In Ghostwritten we are shown many gods: some that view human beings as mere distractions to their larger purpose (chance, the noncorporia), others that make it their work to know all the workings of the human soul (Zookeeper and the author). Perhaps it is not one or the other, as brother Juniper suggests, but both.

Why is this helpful? Hopefully you’ve already picked up on some reasons. This epigraph gives a better idea of theme (looking for the hand of god) and gives the seemingly unrelated narrative threads a clear direction (we are hurtling towards the creation of a force that can we can tangibly prove will affect our lives). This realization, combined with the long fiction writing class I took during the spring semester, has convinced me that I need to switch directions slightly on this blog. I need to move away from the discussion of complex vague thematics and towards something more tangible like story structure. I will be replacing my three thematic sections with two core pillars of discussion: 

“Spring Within a Spring” which will focus on the central narrative thread, the narrative arc of each chapter and other storytelling techniques. 

“Hand of God”, which I will focus more on thematics, specifically on love, chance, authorial choice, noncorporia. 

The other sections will remain the same.

See you soon (hopefully) in Hong Kong.

My experience with Paradise Lost began when I was about seven. My parents had bought me the cassettes for the full-cast production of His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. The epigraph of the first book, The Golden Compass, is from Paradise Lost:

Into this wild abyss,

The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,

Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,

But all these in their pregnant causes mixed

Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,

Unless the almighty maker them ordain

His dark materials to create more worlds,

Into this wild abyss the wary fiend

Stood on the brink of hell and look a while,

Pondering his voyage…

-John Milton, Paradise Lost, Bk II (910-919)

So, for much of my childhood, my imaginings of what Paradise Lost would be like were colored by His Dark Materials. I imagined a fantastical, magical story filled with angels that were willing to challenge God, adventures between worlds and characters like Will, Lyra and Lord Asriel that were so very human.

I didn’t quite get that. Milton is not trying (or least it appears so) to subvert Christianity. Nor does he really explore much outside of the canon of the Bible: adapting and modifying Genesis and Revelation rather than creating something new. However, Paradise Lost had a different kind of magic, that of language, the same magic that I think really drew me to Phillip Pullman’s work. Milton does not really travel to a diverse range of worlds, it’s pretty much just Heaven, Hell and Earth. However, through his use of epic similes, we are transported not only back to Milton’s time, but to the classical and biblical past. My favorite of these is the comparison of the bridge across chaos from Hell to Earth to the bridge of ships that the Persian King Xerxes constructed across the Hellespont:

So if great things to small may be compared

Xerxes the liberty of Greece to yoke

From Susa his Memnonian palace high

Came to the sea and over Hellespont

Bridging his way Europe with Asia joined

And scourged with may a stroke th’indignant waves- Bk. X(306-311)

Spring was late, and so was I.

Synopsis: A young Tokyo record store clerk falls in love in a chance encounter

The beautiful thing about Ghostwritten is that you can read every chapter as a short story. And honestly, not much of the meaning of each episode is lost thinking about the book in this way. But together they become some giant version of Haruki Murakami’s “Chance Traveller”, with events in one story triggering vital events in the next. These character’s lives are literally being ghostwritten by one another.

And in this section, Mitchell proves that he too can ghostwrite. This reads almost exactly like a Murakami short story. The constant references to jazz music. The Bildungsroman of the narrator, Satoru. The sheer Japaneseness of the writing. And while Mitchell will go on to develop this style into a full novel in number9dream, inserting a love letter to his favorite author is not a reason enough for this to be here. I think I have some ideas  

The Human World is Made of Stories

If the Okinawa section is a story about a man struggling to define his hatred, this a story about a man struggling to define love and belonging. In Japan, these two seemingly contrasting ideas are fundamentally intertwined. The mild disgust that even Satoru shows to westerners interweaves with his generation’s use of American culture as a weapon against their parents. Takeshi’s lust for women and his hatred for his own philandering ways can’t seem to escape from one another. Satoru himself cannot reconcile the comfort of “his place” with the need to leave it to be with Tomoyo. Fear of the foreign. Love of the foreign. Need for stability. Need for leaving.

And then there is also the manipulation of the narrative by chance events written by David Mitchell. Quasar’s call to a wrong number in the last chapter is what causes Satoru to be in the store when Tomoyo walks in; which in turn, allows their relationship to begin. This is the first of many dominoes to fall, allowing the events at the end of the book to pass. If this had just been a stand-alone short story or novelette, this would seem like some crazy deus ex machina by Mitchell. Satoru even comments on this: “for a moment I had an odd sensation of being in a story that someone was writing”(55). However, that is in fact the very point of Ghostwritten: the human world may be a collection of chance events, but out of the muck we can always seem to craft a story.

Everything is About Wanting

This story, in particular, seems to be very much about wanting. Or rather that wanting is not the way to contentment/meaning/happiness. That there is another path. As Satoru puts it: “if not love, the what?”(62).

One could argue that love is just another kind of wanting. Love is just a secretion of chemicals barely indistinguishable from lust. But I don’t think that that is the argument Mitchell is trying to make here. There is a very clear distinction between Takeshi’s “few bite marks, about three seconds worth of organsm if you’re lucky, a pleasant drowse for thirty minutes, and when you come to you suddenly realize you’ve become a lecherous, lying sleazebag who’s flushing several million sperm and six years of marriage down the toilet”(50)  and Satoru’s choice to not sleep with Tomoyo because it “would have closed an entrance behind us”(62). One clearly has the moral high ground over the other, just from how they are described. Yet also, one seems to be much sustainable than the other. Lust and want seem to be only captured in the moment: a fleeting cherry blossom falling from a tree. Love is more permanent. Love is thinking about Tomoyo fifteen times a day.

The Her That Lived in Her Looked out Through Her Eyes and Through My Eyes and at The Me That Lives in Me   

But what is love in the first place? Koji claims “you have to know someone intimately to be able to love them”(49). Yet he also recognizes the existence of love at first sight, reconciling the two ideas with “some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other”(49). But maybe there doesn’t have to be a download. Maybe all the information you need to love someone is already within all of us. Maybe all it takes to see that is a spark: eyes meeting in a record store, a thrown baseball bat and a detention, a little bit of yourself in the boy behind the counter. Perhaps it is not that hard to love our fellow human beings. Perhaps we should try a little harder.  

Best Prose:

She pulsed invisibly like a quasar

The cherry blossoms were suddenly there. Magic, frothing and bubbling and there just above our heads filling the air with color too delicate for words like “pink” of “white.

“Because….” I remember her body wrapped inside my duffle coat as we walked along, sharing the same umbrella.

“Might the answer be ‘love’ ”

Things to Keep in Mind:

The foreigner wearing a shirt with a bat flying around a skyscraper

Mr. Ikeda also taught Satoru in high school as well. He was apparently a big Yukio Mishima fan, although not very well read. Mishima was a radical Japanese nationalist, not unlike a certain perpetrator of the Sarin Gas Attacks

“I’ll probably never know the truth, unless I get rich enough to hire a private detective”-another character will do exactly this in number9dream

“None of that capital of Mongolia stuff”-turns out the capital of Mongolia will actually be pretty important later on….

Till next time, in Hong Kong

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

Synopsis: A racist, anti-capitalist Japanese man checks into an Okinawan hotel as his terrorist cell collapses in the aftermath of the Tokyo sarin gas attacks.

The events of this section revolve around one of the perpetrators of a 1995 terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway. And while a lot of the things Quasar (or Keisuke Tanaka) says about the fellowship and his role in the attacks seem straight out of a 1940s racial purists fantasy, this thing existed and committed the crimes claimed. His Serendipity(Shoko Asahara) and many of the other higher ups were actually just only executed a few weeks ago (July,6 2018). In fact the fellowship still exists today too, known outside the confines of the novel as Aum Shinrikyo, having “renounced” its violent past.

This is connection with the real world is interesting, but it does not explain why Mitchell choose this particular jumping off point for his universe trotting adventures. I have a couple ideas.

The Human World is Made of Stories

In school I was taught many, many times about the holocaust. About how the Germans, either through indifference or outright hatred, participated in the murder of six million Jews. I was told this over and over, to ensure that it “never happened again”. I’m sure in Germany that it is even more extreme.

Yet something that we hardly ever touched on, at least not until high school, was the similarly racist attitudes of the Japanese. They believed their emperor was a god and they were his chosen. Koreans, Chinese, American prisoners of war and all of their other opponents, vanquished or not, were treated like objects, not human beings. This culture did not appear overnight (see this Dan Carlin podcast for an interesting story about its origins) and unlike in Germany, it was not eradicated after the Second World War.

Quasar’s thoughts are direct proof of this. He remarks that “these okinawans were never pure-blooded Japanese. Different, weaker ancestors” (2). That “Americans are not a very bright race”(7).. That “we have all been betrayed by a society evolving into markets and for Disney and McDonald’s. All that sacrifice, to build what? To build an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the United States”(8). That “the real atrocity is the modern world’s systematic slaughter of man’s oneness with his anima”(10). Quasar lionizes the Japanese race and its pre-WW2 obsession with strength to exclusion of all else. And he takes the “master race” idea a step further, and excludes those Japanese who do not agree with him.

These ideas, as presented by Quasar are incredibly unnuanced. He could  be a walking propaganda poster for the fellowship and it’s totalitarian ideas. The walking embodiment of hatred. Something that we in the West are supposed to completely vilify. And on my first read through I absolutely despised Quasar. But he is not to blame for the way he is. He’s merely a pawn in the story of Japan, and the way he is because of the cultural and personal forces pushing on his psyche.   

Everything is about wanting

Despite his avowed anti-capitalism, Quasar is very much driven by his desires, just like the rest of us. He tries to deny this, refusing to interface with his sexuality, and retreating into adulation of his Serendipity when his reasons for supporting the fellowship are pulled into question in the hotel.

The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. “You’d have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to be a big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers who promised success would deliver  all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true”(23)

Quasar is for lack of a better word “triggered” by this. Because all of these things are true about the man who used to be called Keisuke Tanaka. He constantly cleanses himself and denies physical pleasures like cigarettes and sexual release. He is certainly lonely: he constantly dreams of forging human connections (especially with women) and hears the voice of His Serendipity in everything. He seems to both love and fear the idea that he is being hunted: he sees potential captors in every one of the unclean. Keisuke also craves recognition: one of his fondest memories of being a novice is discovering that “he had been discussed”.  The alpha waves, the cleansing, the talking through nature are all examples of magic he believes in. Finally, and most importantly, he wants revenge on all of the adult figures that made his childhood hell: the father that never loved him and Mr. Ikeda, a teacher who participated in a cruel joke that pretended Keisuke was dead. All of these things are very human things to want, and this makes Quasar so much more than a monster. Into someone that can be redeemed.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes and through my eyes and at the me that lives in me   

And this brings me to the reason that David Mitchell choose this character to start of his body of work. If he can make us sympathize with a fanatical, racist fascist and understand the reasons for him being so warped, we can understand and sympathize with every character in this book. It is recognizing this humanity in the baby on the subway that nearly causes Quasar to not pull the plug on his gas. And it is this recognition from the villagers in Okinawa that allows Keisuke to hopefully embark on the path to redemption.

Best Prose:

Not a soul was stirring in the giant hotel. Hushed corridors stretched into the noontime distance, empty as catacombs.

Where do people who drop off the edge of the world end up?

Typhoon weather 

Clouds began to ink out the stars one by one

Things to keep in mind

The comet that His Serendipity promises: is it real?

Will we hear more about Mr. Ikeda?

The tunnel dream

The consciousness that cohabits His Serendipity

The baby that seemingly knows Quasar

Until next time, in Tokyo

This is the beginning of my reread of all of David Mitchell’s collected works (which I’ll call the Mitchell-verse from now on). I had some trouble deciding what book to start with, which is part of the beauty of all these books: you can start (almost) anywhere. I could have picked Cloud Atlas, which is the best known, the most “obvious”, for lack of a better word, and has a movie adaptation! I could have chosen Black Swan Green, which is the least complex in terms of themes. A Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet might have also been a good choice: it is the earliest chronologically, the least “Mitchell” book in the Mitchell-verse and is my personal favorite. But I’m going with Ghostwritten. 

The duh reason is because this was first. This was the book that David Mitchell sold to publishers on nothing more than its own merit. He had never published a short story or an essay. And yet so many of the ideas that permeate the whole Mitchell-verse appear here fully formed.

The other reason is more personal. Out of all Mitchell’s books, Ghostwritten is the one I least deeply understand. I want to understand it better, and I want to be able to convey that understanding through writing. I have never written outside of an academic setting before, so this will (hopefully) be a process of growth and discovery.

What does it mean

David Mitchell’s work reminds me a lot of Doctor Who. Part of it is the way their universes are structured: time is a fluid concept, individual episodes or chapters work as standalones and no matter where you start, you will be confused. But I think they’re also united thematically. Doctor Who places a big emphasis on the importance of small actions, redemption and our common humanity. I will argue that David Mitchell’s works do the same. In Ghostwritten *spoilers*, the emphasis seems to be on the fact that we are connected to people we will never meet and that the lives we live can have ripple effects across the whole universe. Over the next couple months I want to explore this theme through a few different lenses.

“The human world is made of stories, not people”

“Everything is about wanting”

“The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.”

See you in Okinawa

Earthdust, Windblown over

Seas shining with forgotten

Sorrow and Laughter

So many vows,

The make you swear and swear.

Obey the king but protect the innocent.

He wondered what he was doing here

And why he had come,

If not to put an end to the murder of children.

Promise me Ned...

Mother I need you too.

I’m trying but I can’t….

I want you to live your life, to kiss a girl

I want to go home

But my father is dying,

My brother is surrounded by foes

I am so tired of being strong...

Those are no sheep bones,

All she wanted was

The big house with the red door,

Not the blood of the dragon.

The childhood she had never known-

Not the wind.

If I look back, I am lost

Did I say it was your honour?

Do you think you are first?

You know nothing.

This is the last one, the very last.

The dead have no mercy in them,

Yet here I stand:

Kill the boy l and let the man be born...

Oh! To be a knight!

I loved a maid as red as autumn,

With summer in her hair

And then the sun went behind a cloud.

The point of the lance snapped of in his neck.

I must not be afraid.

Life is not a song sweetling...

The ashes fell like snow,

There was something in it that made his spine tingle

She died never knowing that he loved her:

That is our great glory and our great tragedy,

You must make that choice yourself,

That last choice was as cruel as the first.

I dreamed I was old...

Snowflakes brushed his cheek

Like cold softs kisses.

I was reborn from the sea,

But I wish I was home

The roots of the trees go deep,

Please let me die as a brother to his children

You have to remember your name.

Do I stand upon a mountaintop

And shout it all, full stop?

Or do I stay far away

And endure the horse’s neigh?

To proselytize

Or avert my eyes?

Neither nor

Against or for.

Ideas fall like leaves in the wind, rain upon the hills

Why should I defend what does not cure ills?

Twenty years will come and go,

What seeds will I sow?

Yet I cannot stand while children die.

I cannot stay silent while adults lie.

The whole truth my ideas may not be

But what is wrong one must surely see.

In silence I sit

While darkness grow.

Without wit

And sword too low

My belief

He drew his master’s old quill from the dirt with a flourish, and unclenched the hand that held the stick-like object only to look down to see that he carried another pen in his hand, this one crafted in the finest mahogany of the southern forests. They had journeyed for a year in those woods, and Ed had been reluctant to see them go. How did he know? Ed thought, for he had never said anything to his master. But of course, Po Alonne was a poet, and poet’s did nothing but notice the world around them and attempt to describe. And so it seems that I am to be a poet too. The ivory pen returned to its resting place in the soil, and Ed returned to the donkeys, where he gathered the items that he had scattered and returned them to the saddlebags.

The ground was dry and cracked after a summer of sun and little rain. Edgar’s frail arms shook in the heat as he dug the grave upon the east side of the hillock, for the old poet had always loved the sunrise. “A new day, a new dawn, a new dance,” Po Alonne had mused, “fetch me a quill Ed, for those are powerful words, meant for many an ear.”

And he had, as any dutiful scribe would. And his master wrote, and when his hand grew tired, he would have Ed write in his stead. What words there were, words of power, words of brilliance. Poems that would make a maiden’s head turn, sonnets that could stop a soldier in his tracks. Words that could wound, words that could heal, and all of them flew right over Ed’s head. He was just a scribe. He could write those words, sure, but that did not mean they could ever be his.

Yet for all the words in the world could not stop the heat of that desert sun, nor put the old poet back onto his donkey. If there was ever a moment Ed wished he could compose it was then. “Water”, croaked Po Alonne. He had drenched his master in the last of it that morning, in an attempt to cool his roasting skin. If the gift of words had run strong in him, perhaps he could have written a haiku to bring forth a well from that cracked earth. But he did not, for although the old poet had taught him his letters, he had not thought to teach him his words.

“When you’re older lad,” he had often said, tapping Ed’s shaved head affectionately, “now my hand’s are tired, but the muse still beckons. Write.”

The shovel hit a patch of damp ground, and Ed had dug deep enough. He gazed at the big man, shrunken and shriveled from the merciless desert sun, the man who had been as close to a father as anyone had ever been. “Who will look after us now?” he said to Patches the Donkey. But it was no use moping while there was still a body to bury. Grabbing his hands and tugging with all his might, for even in death Po Alonne was still a heavy man, Ed managed to pull his master into the hole he had dug with his eyes still pointing skyward, as he would have wanted. “Even in death may you impart wisdom into the world.”

Into the grave he threw the poems, months and months of poem, for it had been a long time since they had last stopped at a castle or a tourney ground. Those poems were no use to him, those were not his words; he had neither commissioned them or created them, and thus they had no power. Not for him, not for anyone. Except for that tired old face that he had begun to shovel sand over. There were no branches in the desert, and Ed did not have the tools to carve a headstone. Instead, he stuck Po Alonne’s quill, a long, elegant ivory thing, into the sand. Pinned underneath it was a piece of parchment.

Ed thought for a long while what to put down on that paper. In the end he decided to try, for even though he had never thought up a verse in his entire life, try was what the Old Poet would have wanted. And besides, the worst that could happen was that it didn’t work. He settled on a haiku, for that was the shortest, he knew.

Here Lies Po Alonne

A man deserving greater

Rest than this dry place

As he read those words aloud, he felt a cool lapping sensation around his ankles, and looked down to see that a spring had begun to bubble between his feet and trickle down the hillside. He ran to their hurriedly-made camp, retrieved the water skins and held them up to the spring with trembling hands. Perhaps some of the old man’s prose had rubbed off on him after all, even if he had never intended to make the desert bloom. Returning to the donkeys with the filled skins, Ed rustled through the saddlebags, searching for something else to pin the poem to the grave with. Spare parchment, dried sausages and an empty wine skin flew onto the desert ground before his hand stumbled upon a stick-like object. Before even fully drawing it out he was already running back towards the grave.

Over asphalt rises a summer sun,

Roads over which my legs have spun. Run.

Listen to the warm winds rise,

As sweat drips into my own eyes.

Before me lies the road

And all I am,

All I will be.

No thoughts obscure my mind

I am the pounding of feet, the turning of wheels,

Not the world I have left behind,

Nor a heart that hurts and heals.

Before me lies the road

And all I am,

All I will be.

My attention cannot waver,

With each passing car I quaver,

But I choose this route, I choose this fear.

I am alive, away from the daily drear.

Before me lies the road

And all I am,

All I will be.

It all must end, all things do

But those hours I spend alone

Before the sun has melted morning dew,

I am the master of all I own.

Behind me lies the road

And all I want to be,

All I could be

I’m starting this tumblr for three reasons

1). I feel like there’s a dearth of literary commentary on a lot of the books I’m reading. Namely David Mitchell

2). I want to share some of my creative work