A plainsman would not only claim to be ignorant of the ways of other regions but willingly appear to be misinformed about them. Most irritating of all to outsiders, he would affect to be without any distinguishing culture rather than allow his land and his ways to be judged part of some larger community of contagious tastes or fashions.
Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.
My journey to the plains was much less arduous than I afterwards described it. And I cannot even say that at a certain hour I knew I had left Australia. But I recall clearly a succession of days when the flat land around me seemed more and more a place that only I could interpret.
Almost anything was possible. Any god might reside behind the thundercloud . . . The almost boundless scope of the possible was limited only by the occurrence of the actual. And it went without saying that what existed in the one sense could never exist in the other. Almost anything was possible except, of course, the actual.
the members of the orchestra were stationed far apart among the audience. Each instrument produced a volume of sound that could be heard only by the few listeners nearest it. The audience was free to move around—as quietly or as noisily as they wished. Some were able to hear snatches of melody as subtle as the scraping together of grass-blades or the throbbing of the brittle tissue of insects. A few even found some spot from which more than one instrument was audible. Most heard no music at all.
I lifted my own camera to my face and stood with my eye pressed against the lens and my finger poised as if to expose to the film in its dark chamber the darkness that was the only visible sign of whatever I saw beyond myself.
I should remind the reader that every sentence hereabouts is part of a work of fiction.
I would devise a more satisfying enterprise than either reading or writing. During the rest of my life I would concern myself only with those mental entities that had come to me almost stealthily while I read or while I wrote but had never afterwards detached themselves from me: I would contemplate those images and yield to those feelings that comprised the lasting essence of all my reading and my writing. During the rest of my life, I would go on reading from a vast book with no pages, or I would write intricate sentences made up of items other than words.
Long before I stopped writing, I had come to understand that I had never created any character or imagined any plot. My preferred way of summing up my deficiencies was to say simply that I had no imagination.
I can recall my having discovered as early as in 1952, while I was reading Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott, that the female characters-in-my-mind, so to call them, were completely different in appearance from the characters-in-the-text, so to call them.
Very early in his life, the chief character became accustomed to thinking of his mind as a place. It was, of course, not a single place but a place containing other places: a far-reaching and varied landscape.
He was no mere observer of mental scenery. He was not long in learning that he could alter certain details and have them stay as he preferred them to be.
Some of what I had written had been published, but most of it had been stored as manuscripts or typescripts in my filing cabinets and will be there still when I die.
This might have been the first time for as long as I could remember when I had kept out of my mind all thoughts of books of fiction that I had written or of books of fiction that I hoped to write in future and perhaps, too, of books of fiction that other persons had written and that I had read... I might have said afterwards that I had survived for an hour without fiction or that I had experienced life for a little the life I would have led if I had never had recourse to fiction.
... a long stretch of grassy plains, with a line of trees in the far distance.
