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I hadn’t originally planned to write a preface to this work but I have far more memories of the whole experience than I had expected. This is probably true of every passage of our lives: against the background of decades, one period of a year or so may appear as a brief interlude, but if it was truly eventful, once the telling begins, there seems no end to it. A central principle of art is never to offer your public anything that requires an apology, but the length and structure of what follows deserve some explaining. I mention below that I kept no journal at the time, and the price one pays for this is not only the loss of many small details, but a serious confusion of sequential events. It’s impossible for me to recall anything but the season of most of these moments; in many instances, I seem to have lost all sense of which preceded and which followed. I’d like to claim that historical cause and effect is irrelevant in a narrative like this—I think many readers might agree. But in all honesty, I would treasure a written record of my days and nights in that quiet place, although an experienced editor might say it’s just as well such a record was never kept—enough is enough. I will say that I’m consoled for the loss of the sequence by the belief that it would not have dispelled the random feel of the telling; my grouping of events by subject rather than time may replace one kind of randomness with another, but it made an anecdotal approach much easier, and this I find a lot more comfortable. That’s as close to an apology as I intend to get. Richard Matthew Simpson |
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