Things to keep in mind:
The secret of plot.
This book has its beginnings in an image and some scraps of dialogue that presented themselves to my mind rather abruptly one day. There were two figures on a road. Men, women? Age, nationality? Hard to tell. The light was poor, their cloaks were wrapped around them, they were hurrying along. What language were they speaking? I don’t know, but I seemed to understand them perfectly, the way we understand talk in dreams. I also knew, without being told, that they were traveling to consult an oracle.
One of the figures said, “What if it doesn’t say anything?” The other said, “It won’t say anything; it won’t just give us simple instructions.” The wind rose; clouds scuttled across the moon. The first figure said, “What if it says just what we want to hear?” The other said, “What do we want to hear?”
Much later, when the night was almost completely dark, and only shifting shadows were to be seen, a voice said, “What if it’s closed when we get there?” Another voice said, “Closed? You mean like a museum or a library or a shop?” The first voice said, “Yes. Or like a ruin or an abandoned house.” The second voice said, “Well, I suppose we would have to tell the story of our journey, what we saw on the way there and the way back, and why we came.”
—posted 5447 days ago
