I love penguins. This made my day.
tphd:
Interesting to note that people don’t understand fiction as magic. A piece of fiction is a spell. I hear people expressing their understanding (or parroting other’s understanding) of fiction as “transportive” but you must all secretly know that it isn’t true. It’s not you who is transported. Fiction is an act of conjuration. Evocation. It’s an invitation, and perhaps something is transported but it isn’t you. It’s more accurate to say that something has been let in.
What have you let inside you?
What have you invited in?A library is a bush of ghosts and you swallow them, you well read men and women, you swallow all the ghosts and they go inside you and stay there. You do not know it but you are haunted by the books you’ve read. You’re a mansion on a hill with a clouded night-time backdrop and there’s lightning and the black roots of a half-dead tree, something like a claw. Or a map. It’s funny how all roads lead to death and I wonder what happens, when you die, to all the ghosts. You at the River Styx, vomiting into the water and all the ghosts like fishes, like spectral guppies in the black. The cold, black water, barely disturbed, and now you’re empty by the shore.
It’s not so bad, really.
It’s just new.
And quiet.
Borders (via thegirlandherbooks)
