Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888) "Yes. The creator could save himself a lot of trouble by setting beginning very near the end. He could make it all its mementos and history and cosmic evidence whenever he chose, or as late as he chose." "Yes. He could make it all at the last moment, all complete, and who would know the difference? He could make it between the moment that he had Gabriel set lip to horn, and the moment that he sounded that last (and only) note." "And if he c

“There’ll Always Be Another Me” is one of my least favorite Lafferty stories. It is a late variation on the schizo-gash, a potshot at the New Age metaphysical temperament. That I don’t mind. The story’s trick: one locks a door to force something out, only to find oneself abruptly on the other side, locked out instead. We have two main characters who become four. One day, the unified Spaltman (let's call these unified selves Priors) decides to answer ten advertisements from Lo

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. — Micah 5:2 "Certainly we have hea

Nathan admonishes King David by Aert de Gelder (1683) 1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. 2 The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: 3 But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bos

“Nor Limestone Islands” is the hit single of Lafferty’s Fortean stories. It has a sticky title. Within that heterogeneous group, it is reader-friendly. It is centripetally Fortean. In these ways, it is like “Fall of Pebble Stones.” Both stories point like the Hand from Heaven to printed lines of Fort’s The Book of the Damned (1919). Lafferty seemed to tire of using Fort in this way. His preferred method became reimagining Fort. He then raids Charles Fort for ideas, twistin

The greatest loss of life from a "natural disaster" in the United States occurred on September 9, 1900, when a category 4 hurricane struck the boom town of Galveston, Texas killing at least 8,000 people, destroying about 7,000 buildings and leaving more than 10,000 people homeless. In comparison, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 which struck the New Orleans area in 2005, killed about 1,800 and displaced about one million people. The city of Galveston as it was, never really re

A while back, I put together a broad programmatic statement for the blog, and I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts that help me read Lafferty. The “you” in these thoughts is really me. Lafferty, in interviews and correspondence, said he never meant to confuse readers, but he did so at times while trying to do something difficult. I believe him. This is one of the ways in which Lafferty is not a modernist who throws out contingent difficulty for the aesthetic pleasure of con

You make one comment though that is as totally backwards as anything can be in this world: “There is very little real tragedy in life because so few people have the emotional capacity to live them . . .” But the fellahin people who make up ninety-seven percent of mankind do have almost total emotional capacity for real tragedy, and that is the ambient they live in. It is only the effete semi-literates (there are no true literates) who have become innoculated against tragedy (

"The "Sad Adventure of Consciousness," an unpleasantness that lasted no more than seven thousand years, was a sort of response to former dilemmas, a cure that was worse than the sickness . . . There are no more dilemmas or other two-horned problems bothering the world now. So we raise one-horned monuments, single-horned for our single-mindedness . . . A two-horned head, of whatever sort, was likely to have a two-pronged or conscious mind inside of it. But now it will all be e

My stories are slightly future history, set just far enough into the future as not to get stepped on by the present. Yes, I hope the bits and pieces will fall into it. I am always out in the rain with a bucket and trying to catch something. Yes, sometimes I use the old trick of having stories connected by a common minor character or otherwise. Balzac was one of the inventors of this device a hundred and forty or so years ago. In his Human Comedy, he ran quite a few of his cha

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of Gnosticism/eschatology and R. A. Lafferty lately, so here’s a quick sketch, more a prompt than a full argument, with a way in. Philip K. Dick and Lafferty share an obsession: the twentieth-century recovery of Gnosticism as the problem of modernity. Hans Jonas is the obvious touchstone; both writers almost certainly knew his work. What interests me is where they split once you ask what “Gnosticism” means under modern conditions. How muc

I began to try to write in about 1959 and went a year or so before my first sale . . . My life has been mostly interior and that interior very shallow. . . I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it). So it stands. There isn't much of a biography. Most of my life I forgot to live. — letter to Damon Knight, Se

Now, the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood, who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood? — Augustine, On Christian Doctrine ( De doctrina christiana ), Book IV, Chapter 2, §3 There are the ultimate in evil who keep the venom and change the Name of the Snake. Pope Francis had a knack for getting headlines. He once remarked that he would baptize an extraterrestrial w

A Past Master exam for the hardcore Lafferty reader. All gnawing questions I keep going back to. Why does Pottscamp stutter? What is the structural role of the boy with the toy? Who is the false ansel? Why is the Ouden passage dream delayed? What is the relation of Adam to Athens and Jerusalem? Why did Cathead only appear twenty years ago? Who is the stranger at the end of the novel? Who are the time travelers who visited Thomas More before Paul, and why did they do it? What

" . . . whether persistent and inveterate wickedness might be changed, by habit, into a kind of nature, you, reader, must judge, that is, if in any way, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those unseen and eternal ages, that portion will be wholly discordant from that final unity and harmony. In the meantime, however, both in these seen and temporal ages and in those that are unseen and eternal, all those beings are arranged in order, by reason, according to the measu

This is because, in another sense, who [Origen] was and what he achieved have been hidden for the better part of the Christian era behind a false mythology and an even falser historical record. Though, as I say, he towers over the landscape of Christian thought, he has done so invisibly ever since his putative "condemnation" in 553 at the Fifth Ecumenical Council. — David Bentley Hart, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies (2020) Advanced Lafferty. I have a theory about why

I have a theory though that a person constantly edits and updates his memories, and that the updated memories are at least as valid as the original memories. As to the original facts, they have no being except in the cloud of memories that shows approximately where they once were. — Letter What did he mean by 'really'? We had been up into reality, up into blue-sky reality almost all day long. Why the grubby question? Following a recent post , I have been thinking about memory

For the end of the world was long ago, And all we dwell to-day Like children of some second birth, Like a strange people left on earth After a judgment day. For the end of the world was long ago, When the ends of the world waxed free, When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves, And the sun drowned in the sea. — G. K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse , Book I But we have divine sanction and assurance that the Church will endure to the end of the world, it is said. No, we

Though more than half of mankind does not believe in the ultimates and basics, surely less than five percent of the Science Fiction People have any belief at all in what is real. Science Fiction is, for ninety-five percent of the people who indulge in it, a surrogate “True Belief,” in things from which the truth has been carefully removed. It is a “True Belief” in a false religion, one without dimension. — “True Belivers” (Prose Statement) The city is built To music, therefor