#john gardner

When you read something so adult as a kid, it's a sort of revelation. One on hand, you feel so smart to encounter something kids aren't supposed to read, but on the other hand, the sexual content makes you ashamed. There's a scene where Grendel fantasizes about the "hole" between Wealtheow's legs, and I remember it being the first time I was ever forced to reckon with female anatomy. I was terrified my mother would read the book herself (she never did) and annihilate me off the face of the earth when she found out I had encountered such content. A year or two later, I would read a Clive Cussler adventure novel, and I remember ripping out a page that contained a sex scene so as to destroy any evidence I read it.

[...] That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us. At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

It is not unusual to find that the major changes in life—a marriage, a move to a new city, a change of jobs, or a national emergency—break the patterns of our lives and reveal to us quite suddenly how much we had been imprisoned by the comfortable web we had woven around ourselves. [...]

One of the reasons why mature people are apt to learn less than young people is that they are willing to risk less. Learning is a risky business, and they do not like failure. In infancy, when the child is learning at a truly phenomenal rate—a rate he or she will never again achieve—he or she is also experiencing a shattering number of failures. Watch him or her. See the innumerable things he or she tries and fails. And see how little the failures discourage him or her.

With each year that passes he or she will be less blithe about failure. By adolescence the willingness of young people to risk failure has diminished greatly. And all too often parents push them further along that road by instilling fear, by punishing failure, or by making success seem too precious.

By middle age most of us carry around in our heads a tremendous catalogue of things we have no intention of trying again because we tried them once and failed—or tried them once and did less well than our self-esteem demanded. [But] there is no learning without some difficulty and fumbling. [...] When Max Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize he said: "Looking back…over the long and labyrinthine path which finally led to the discovery [of the quantum theory], I am vividly reminded of Goethe’s saying that men will always be making mistakes as long as they are striving after something." »

Grendel sketches!! I am in agony figuring out his color scheme and I’m sure that I’ll be tweaking it once more puppet pictures are released. I need them. God, I need them

JOHN GARDNER 1981 - 1996