There are many more words than you could ever wish to use! I taunt you with those words. I bellow them out into the air within your hearing in order to humiliate you. That is why you avoid me, because I burden you with so many words, heaping them upon your head, or flinging them after you as you hurry away from me, fine, well-turned, latinate, polysyllabic, Miltonic words of the kind faithfully and carefully stowed away only in dictionaries. That is where I live my rich and fulfilling life, within the pages of many dictionaries, with my torch and my eyeglass, digging ever deeper into dictionaries, preferably the old ones. I spend whole days together down there, a deep-cast miner of words. Clothes mean nothing to me. Abluting this body means nothing to me - let it stink to high heaven! I have no time for such irrelevancies. There is too much steady accumulation to be done, and each day offers me twenty-four hours only in which to do it. What am I to do with these words now that you have refused to listen to me, now that you have left me here to my own devices? The question is an irrelevance. I do not need to justify this pursuit. When they are all present in front of - and behind and beside - me, I need do nothing but admire their magnificence as they stretch away and away from me. These words speak for themselves. Can you describe these seven hundred and ninety-four paragraphs as a collection of stories each of that length? Or are they more glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of other people: fleeting moments in complicated, or simple, lives? In modern jargon, might they be called prose poems?No two readers will interpret them the same, and probably not as the author envisaged - but isn't that the point? Doesn't fiction take on a life of its own once you set it free?It is perhaps a book more for dipping in and out of than one to read end-to-end, and depending on your mood, the weather, the day of the week, you will see something different, something new, and something outside of the story itself.
