Ryzak / The Headman / The Old Man Quotes in An Imaginary Life
My life has been so frivolous. Brought up to believe in my own nerves, in restlessness, variety, change; educated entirely out of books, living always in a state of soft security, able to pamper myself, to drift about in a cloud of tender feelings, and with comfortable notions of my own intelligence, sociability, kindness, good breeding; moved by nothing I couldn’t give a name to, believing in nothing I couldn’t see.
The old man’s stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that explains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it […] I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic.
Ryzak / The Headman / The Old Man Quotes in An Imaginary Life
My life has been so frivolous. Brought up to believe in my own nerves, in restlessness, variety, change; educated entirely out of books, living always in a state of soft security, able to pamper myself, to drift about in a cloud of tender feelings, and with comfortable notions of my own intelligence, sociability, kindness, good breeding; moved by nothing I couldn’t give a name to, believing in nothing I couldn’t see.
The old man’s stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that explains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it […] I begin to see briefly, in snatches, how this old man, my friend, might see the world. It is astonishing. Bare, cruel, terrible, comic.