Complex Numbers

Quote

PROMPT September 27th

Today, the prompt comes from Prosperous Snow celebrating !

Share a quote from either your favorite author or your favorite book and discuss why you like it.

Anything contemplated for too long, or repeated often enough, loses its impact. So it is with favorite authors, books, and quotes: I've had several over the years, and their meaning has shifted for me.

That's how we get clichés, you know. Every cliché is born as profound poetry. A knife starts life with a gleaming, razor edge; use and familiarity dulls it, inevitably. Knives can be honed, of course; a cliché, once blunted, can never regain their sharpness. But sometimes, if you try, you can remember the feeling it left you with the first time you heard it.

Ask me tomorrow, and I'd probably pick a different quote, a different author. If you'd asked me yesterday, I'd have probably picked a different quote by a different author.

But the night is deep, there's a portentous chill in the air, and October looms, so today's quote comes from Roger Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, a book I mentioned in here some time ago. Days? Weeks? Time morphs.

Such times are rare, such times are fleeting, but always bright when caught, measured, hung, and later regarded in times of adversity, there in the kinder halls of memory, against the flapping of the flames.

Read it slowly. Read it out loud, if you can. Feel the rhythms and the way the words trip over themselves. Contemplate the feelings it evokes.

I'm not even sure I can explain why I like it, which is a shitty position for a writer to be in. But it's not just a struggle to find the right words; it's also something related to what I said about clichés, above: regarding anything too closely, trying to explain it to oneself, well, that turns it into something lesser, and I don't want to do that with this quote.

One of the most absurd plagues ever inflicted upon the literary world is deconstructionism. No, some things should be left as they are, and I think this quote is one of them.

It's even better in the context of the scene it's in, but I don't think the particulars matter. I can apply it to any moment of joy or delight, make it something to help me get through the inevitable darkness.

That's one reason I'm so adamantly opposed to the "live in the moment" philosophy. Sure, sometimes it's nice to forget the bad things that happened in the past, but is that any reason to ignore the good ones? No. No, it is not.

In fact, Zelazny had a quote about that, too: "It is anticipation and recollection that fill the heart—never the sensation of the moment."

And now I've gone way beyond what I intended to say.