Night of the Living Rez delivers stories that combine the otherworldly with the everyday in ways that startle and sing. Morgan Talty portrays Maine and his Penobscot characters in language and images both beautiful and inventive. With equal parts humor and haunting, this book will linger.
Night of the Living Rez is an indelible portrait of a family in crisis, and an incisive exploration of the myriad ways in which the past persists in haunting the present. I loved these sharply atmospheric, daring, and intensely moving stories, each one dense with peril and tenderness. Morgan Talty is a thrilling new talent.
Stories Of Ourselves Ebook 106
12. History therefore becomes the arena where we see what God does for humanity. God comes to us in the things we know best and can verify most easily, the things of our everyday life, apart from which we cannot understand ourselves.
It is essential, therefore, that the values chosen and pursued in one's life be true, because only true values can lead people to realize themselves fully, allowing them to be true to their nature. The truth of these values is to be found not by turning in on oneself but by opening oneself to apprehend that truth even at levels which transcend the person. This is an essential condition for us to become ourselves and to grow as mature, adult persons.
32. In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people. This suggests an important tension. On the one hand, the knowledge acquired through belief can seem an imperfect form of knowledge, to be perfected gradually through personal accumulation of evidence; on the other hand, belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person's capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring.
At about the same time it was given out that Napoleon had arranged to sell the pile of timber to Mr. Pilkington; he was also going to enter into a regular agreement for the exchange of certain products between Animal Farm and Foxwood. The relations between Napoleon and Pilkington, though they were only conducted through Whymper, were now almost friendly. The animals distrusted Pilkington, as a human being, but greatly preferred him to Frederick, whom they both feared and hated. As the summer wore on, and the windmill neared completion, the rumours of an impending treacherous attack grew stronger and stronger. Frederick, it was said, intended to bring against them twenty men all armed with guns, and he had already bribed the magistrates and police, so that if he could once get hold of the title-deeds of Animal Farm they would ask no questions. Moreover, terrible stories were leaking out from Pinchfield about the cruelties that Frederick practised upon his animals. He had flogged an old horse to death, he starved his cows, he had killed a dog by throwing it into the furnace, he amused himself in the evenings by making cocks fight with splinters of razor-blade tied to their spurs. The animals' blood boiled with rage when they heard of these things being done to their comrades, and sometimes they clamoured to be allowed to go out in a body and attack Pinchfield Farm, drive out the humans, and set the animals free. But Squealer counselled them to avoid rash actions and trust in Comrade Napoleon's strategy.
What drove me to write was the extreme manual clumsiness from which Ihave always suffered. I attribute it to a physical defect which mybrother and I both inherit from our father; we have only one joint inthe thumb. The upper joint (that furthest from the nail) is visible, butit is a mere sham; we cannot bend it. But whatever the cause, naturelaid on me from birth an utter incapacity to make anything. With penciland pen I was handy enough, and I can still tie as good a bow as everlay on a man's collar; but with a tool or a bat or a gun, a sleeve-linkor a corkscrew, I have always been unteachable. It was this that forcedme to write. I longed to make things, ships, houses, engines. Manysheets of cardboard and pairs of scissors I spoiled, only to turn frommy hopeless failures in tears. As a last resource, as a pis aller, Iwas driven to write stories instead; little dreaming to what a world ofhappiness I was being admitted. You can do more with a castle in a storythan with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
Here my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormoussatisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literarypleasures--"dressed animals" and "knights-in-armour". As a result, Iwrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail tokill not giants but cats. But already the mood of the systematiser wasstrong in me; the mood which led Trollope so endlessly to elaborate hisBarsetshire. The Animal-Land which came into action in the holidays whenmy brother was at home was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trainsand steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed,of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my storiesmust be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the twoperiods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing tohistoriography; I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land.Though more than one version of this instructive work is extant, I neversucceeded in bringing it down to modern times; centuries take a deal offilling when all the events have to come out of the historian's head.But there is one touch in the History that I still recall with somepride. The chivalric adventures which filled my stories were in italluded to very lightly and the reader was warned that they might be"only legends". Somehow--but heaven knows how--I realised even then that ahistorian should adopt a critical attitude towards epic material. Fromhistory it was only a step to geography. There was soon a map ofAnimal-Land--several maps, all tolerably consistent. Then Animal-Land hadto be geographically related to my brother's India, and Indiaconsequently lifted out of its place in the real world. We made it anisland, with its north coast running along the back of the Himalayas;between it and Animal-Land my brother rapidly invented the principalsteamship routes. Soon there was a whole world and a map of that worldwhich used every colour in my paint box. And those parts of that worldwhich we regarded as our own--Animal-Land and India--were increasinglypeopled with consistent characters.
Intellectually, the time I spent at Oldie's was almost entirely wasted;if the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more,it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good. Geometryand some pages in West's English Grammar (but even those I think Ifound for myself) are the only items on the credit side. For the rest,all that rises out of the sea of arithmetic is a jungle of dates,battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned andperfectly useless had they been remembered. There was also a greatdecline in my imaginative life. For many years Joy (as I have definedit) was not only absent but forgotten. My reading was now mainlyrubbish; but as there was no library at the school we must not makeOldie responsible for that. I read twaddling school-stories in TheCaptain. The pleasure here was, in the proper sense, merewish-fulfilment and fantasy; one enjoyed vicariously the triumphs of thehero. When the boy passes from nursery literature to school-stories heis going down, not up. Peter Rabbit pleases a disinterestedimagination, for the child does not want to be a rabbit, though he maylike pretending to be a rabbit as he may later like acting Hamlet; butthe story of the unpromising boy who became captain of the First Elevenexists precisely to feed his real ambitions. I also developed a greattaste for all the fiction I could get about the ancient world: QuoVadis, Darkness and Dawn, The Gladiators, Ben Hur. It might beexpected that this arose out of my new concern for my religion, but Ithink not. Early Christians came into many of these stories, but theywere not what I was after. I simply wanted sandals, temples, togas,slaves, emperors, galleys, amphitheatres; the attraction, as I now see,was erotic, and erotic in rather a morbid way. And they were mostly, asliterature, rather bad books. What has worn better, and what I took toat the same time, is the work of Rider Haggard; and also the"scientifiction" of H. G. Wells. The idea of other planets exercisedupon me then a peculiar, heady attraction, which was quite differentfrom any other of my literary interests. Most emphatically it was notthe romantic spell of Das Ferne. "Joy" (in my technical sense) neverdarted from Mars or the Moon. This was something coarser and stronger.The interest, when the fit was upon me, was ravenous, like a lust. Thisparticular coarse strength I have come to accept as a mark that theinterest which has it is psychological, not spiritual; behind such afierce tang there lurks, I suspect, a psychoanalytical explanation. Imay perhaps add that my own planetary romances have been not so much thegratification of that fierce curiosity as its exorcism. The exorcismworked by reconciling it with, or subjecting it to, the other, the moreelusive, and genuinely imaginative, impulse. That the ordinary interestin scientifiction is an affair for psychoanalysts is borne out by thefact that all who like it, like it thus ravenously, and equally by thefact that those who do not, are often nauseated by it. The repulsion ofthe one sort has the same coarse strength as the fascinated interest ofthe other and is equally a tell-tale.
As will be seen from this anecdote one dominant factor in our life athome was the daily absence of our father from about nine in the morningtill six at night. For the rest of the day we had the house toourselves, except for the cook and housemaid with whom we were sometimesat war and sometimes in alliance. Everything invited us to develop alife that had no connection with our father. The most important of ouractivities was the endless drama of Animal-Land and India, and this ofitself isolated us from him. 2ff7e9595c
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