History is not false but true when it is put dramatically. It is not true but false when it arrives anyhow, proceeds at random like an unconsidered run of nature, and ceases unravelled without the gathering of the threads into a conclusion. — Hilaire Belloc, "The Historian" In 1955, Hollis and Carter published a volume of Hilaire Belloc’s uncollected essays under the title One Thing and Another. Lafferty was an avid reader of Belloc, so it is unlikely that he did not know the

Giulio Romano, The Fall of the Giants, 1532–1534. Fresco, Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy. "No, Atrox, you are wrong," Denis Lollardy said firmly. "You did not bury him in the ground, you buried him in your mind. And I found him there, for all of us can raid into your mind as you can raid into ours. And then I carved him out of fine travertine marble. He was one of my greatest forgeries, forgeries for which there was no physical original. Then I buried my magnific

One question in Lafferty’s thinking about the end of contingent worlds is how to measure a life against the world’s. Everyone grows older and sees worlds fade. That is, anyone who is lucky enough to live long enough to experience that kind of loss. Lafferty certainly went through it. He was probably haunted by this more than most people (I think) because his father was so old when he was born, and he was the baby of the family. His grandparents were a century older than he. H

“The children, Austro and Loretta and Mary (none of them is more than a child or at most an adolescent), are close kindred, closer to each other, perhaps, than to us. It is common, perhaps universal, that children are of a slightly different race (I mean it literally) than they will later become. But it is all right with them.” “When were the several decades left out of United States history, Barnaby?” Cris Benedetti asked him. “Early, and recent, and present, for I rather su

"What do you do when you have just hanged a man? Why, the man himself had showed us what to do. Besides, a future kind of man doesn't leave much of a hole in the present." I've also sent you three other endings to it, designed so you can use any of the four page 16's here and throw the others away. Or, if none of these endings will do it any good, and if any of your sharpies can design an ending to make it sell, I'll split the proceeds with him. — Letter to A. L. Fierst, June

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead. “We won't be taken in by that, Mr. Sheen,” Hector O'Day said. “We're too smart for that.” “So was the little boy who got pulled all the way down to Hell nine years ago,” Anselm Sheen said. “He was a really smart boy. He reminds me of you, Hector.” Jack of diamonds, Jack of Diamonds, I’ve known you of old / You’ve robbed my poor pockets of silver

“We do not even know what his character is,” said Doctor Fell. “Most men who sound vicious take out their viciousness vocally. And all of the sadists I have known, and I have known a great many in thirty years of police work, are mild of talk and appearance and inclined to banter. You will have to admit that Soapy Seeley is not what we might call a sterling character. A man of sterling character is not arrested two hundred plus either thirteen or fourteen times in ten years.

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

Simon Frakes stood there with his grin that was a caricature as a cartoonist might have drawn it. He was there. Then only his grin was there, mocking them in the empty air. "I’m sure that I know that grin from somewhere," Professor Dodgson mumbled. Ah, but memory is a cat-like thing. It creeps away soft-footed, and is gone. "If you do not believe this, then you will not believe anything," said the grin of Simon Frakes. Then the grin itself vanished, and that was the last that

The professor looked at his watch, looked at his schedule, saw that he still had a little time before his final class, glanced at the final entry in the book, "I love you, Emily," smiled, closed the small notebook, and put it in his pocket. "Women have a satirical turn of mind," he said to his companion. "What? Are you sure?" the companion asked. "Blenheim denies it, and the evidence in Creager is doubtful. And Pfirschbaum in his monumental monogram Satire und Geschlecht has

“Everybody liked him except those animals, the coons, badgers, and wolverines, those animals that traditionally hate and fear dogs. Then there appeared a wolverine of genius in the neighborhood. In every species, whether wolverine or human or other, about one individual in five million will be an individual of genius. The gifted wolverine got about a hundred other wolverines to assemble. He had to be a genius because the slashing solitary wolverines are lone hunters who hate

Bernard Baruch with JFK The Three Armageddons of Enniscorty Sweeny is so damned slippery. “It is slippery, General, slippery,” Austro said modestly. There will probably never be a consensus about it—how it works, what it does, what it says. The book overloads the mind. It arrests thought. It does so deliberately, aggressively. That is why serious Lafferty readers should think hard about it rather than settle for confusion as an endpoint. Aggressive Lafferty is interesting Laf

“Oh sure, you're loaded with weird stuff. You couldn't function otherwise. It's an essential enzyme in you. It will replace itself as rapidly as it's used, and it's meant to be used. The whole world is there in caricature, and something is busy there solving the problems and fictions of the world. Or else it is the prime stuff in there, and it is the world that is the caricature of it.” — “It’s Down the Slippery Stairs” A few quick notes on being totalizing: I believe readers

“I have watched the wheels go round in case I might see the living creatures like the appearance of lamps, in case I might see the Living God projected from the Machine. I have said to the perfected steel, be my sister and for the glassy towers I thought I felt some beginnings of his creature, But A, a, a, Domine Deus, my hands found the glazed work unrefined and the terrible crystal a stage-paste . . . Eia, Domine Deus.” — David Jones, “A, a, a, Domine Deus” I caught this mo

“What we eat out of your minds are the most serious things that your minds are capable of holding. What we steal and eat out of your bodies are the tastiest things in your bodies. We come to table on you, and we feast on you.” Lafferty returns often to the idea of privation as a threat to the person. Of the many examples one could point to, his best-known is probably Ouden in Past Master—Ouden, the nothingness. “It displeased Ouden that any be . . . He has a jealous maw.” “We

Oh, as to details, the music of the opera, though rotten, is superbly rotten. The costuming and staging is splendid. And all the singing is powerful. The plot has all the unhinged unity of any shipwreck. And there is movement and force and power. Power above all! This is Destruction as pageant and presentation. One has the feeling that something very large will come out of all of this. Yes, like the destruction of the world. . . . The story lines, although the world is confor

They had been in the large, unconscious, amitotic environment of intense activity kept well below the surface. It was there that the requisitions for sons were fulfilled; it was there that the selections were made as to what things should rise above the surface, what things might be kept in harmless somnolence below thesurface forever, and what things must be destroyed while they were still below the surface to prevent them from making trouble later. So it was that the boys b

This second Why Epiktistes? post shares analytical tools for thinking about memory’s role in the Institute story cycle. The guiding idea is that Epiktistes should be conceived first and foremost as an anti-amnesia machine. He is built to combat forgetting. That is what makes him, in the deepest sense, Epi-Ktistec. I also want to comment on how the Institute materials relate to the Ghost Story. Lafferty began what became the Institute cycle during the prenucleation phase of th

“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. In 2018, Kevin Cheek started a thread on Facebook's East of Laughter asking whether Epiktistes was related to Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the 1st and early 2nd centuries. I’ll address that first: does Epiktistes have anything to do with Epictetus? No. That’s silly. I’ll try again. What Epiktistes has to do with Epictetus is that both names might look at

Mountains delectable they now ascend, Where Shepherds be, which to them do commend Alluring things, and things that cautious are, Pilgrims are steady kept by faith and fear. — John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) “By stumbling backwards over no road at all, down hill and through tangled brush, until we found ourselves in the bottom of a pit,” a dour old machine issued. “Then we noticed that the bottom of the pit was actually the top of the Delectable Mountain. If there