Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

and plot are for the most part imaginary, but passages from numerous books have been ripped from their original contexts and inserted, slightly altered, into this story. I cannot explain in detail here—perhaps I could not explain fully, down to the last iota, even to myself—why I have not totally recast borrowed material, so that no acknowledgment is legally or morally necessary; but I can say this much: my ideal novel is a universe of voices, not a work of triumphant individual will but a human chorus, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not—an edifice modified by all who have used it, generation on generation, the way very old churches and schools have been modified, a window plugged here, a chimney added there, here and there old beams replaced by steel—a concatenation in which I, the novelist, serve mainly as moderator, keeping the various contributions more or less relevant both in the sense that they apply and in the sense that they tend to move the whole kaboodle in some direction that satisfies my intuition of where things ought to go. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m indifferent to design (though it’s true that I have no objection to “loose, baggy monsters” if they hold my attention); I mean only that, writing a novel, one is always on familiar philosophical ground. No one, not even the most ingenious writer of sci-fi, can find a wholly new domain for dramas of human personality in conflict, which is our business, mostly, or so it seems to me. And the philosophical ground of this novel, being as old, at least, as human consciousness, has been much trampled over the years and even millions of years, so that to limit one’s dramatizing voice would be like stubbornly refusing to use any mathematics one has not thought up from scratch by oneself.

I have borrowed so widely that no complete list of original sources is possible. A few books I’ve made heavy use of are Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Howard Gardner’s The Shattered Mind, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Robert E. Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness, and M. B. Dykshoorn’s My Passport Reads Clairvoyant. From all of these books I take individual lines (which I make some character speak), images and symbols which may sink of their own weight to the novel’s bedrock or may, on the other hand, serve as mere surface decorations, and ideas—even ideas for characters—which grope out toward everything else in the construction, helping to hold the thing together. Various other writers have influenced this work almost equally, but for them I can mention no single book. I’ve ranged freely, for instance, through the writings of Darwin, Freud, Jung, and Rank, and through the outpourings of both scientific and popular writers on the so-called paranormal, writers for example like Joseph Chilton Pearce (The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg)—writers who seem to me to range, both collectively and individually, from the profound to the unspeakably silly.

Fragment One

Nothing is stable; all systems fail. Imponderables, improbabilities … Not even the weary man’s willing decline toward the grave is entirely to be trusted. Consider the case of Gerald Craine, detective.

Consider Craine sweating and tossing on his bed, asleep in his miserable, stinking hotel room, his mind numbed by whiskey, weighted like the deadmen in the long-forgotten swamps of his childhood—oak limbs, cotton-woods, once-towering sycamores brought down, back then, not by insects or disease or the voracious mills or by land speculation but by tornadoes and the heaviness of age. The faded gray wallpaper in Craine’s one room is splotched and cracked, bulging here and there, like the old man’s forehead; the padless, once-wine-red threadbare carpet lumps up into ropes, like the veins on the backs of his hands. His history lies around him, miraculously decayed. He has books everywhere, wedged into the bookshelves of cheap, stained pine, strewn along the baseboards, stacked up, dusty, in the corners of the room. On the bedpost above him his pistol hangs, precariously tilted in its shoulder holster; on his dresser, in its dusty old Bible-black case, lies the pitted, once-silver cornet he hasn’t touched in years. A streetlight burns the night smoke-gray outside his window, lighting up telephone and electric lines and throwing a negative shadow along the floor toward his closet. The closet door hangs open, too warped to close. It has a broken spool for a doorknob. The interior of the closet, just visible from Craine’s bed, is crowded with dark, restive forms. Old Craine cries out, as if aware of them, and his hands claw and clench. His knees jerk.

Fragment Two

He was standing now beside a long row of carrels that stretched behind and ahead of him. He looked down at the paper: number 34. He was standing almost exactly in front of it. Craine shuddered at the coincidence and moved closer. Through the narrow glass window beside the door he made out that the carrel was unoccupied, but there was clear evidence that it hadn’t been and wouldn’t be unoccupied long. The little room, tight and awkward as an upended coffin, was so crammed with books there was no room to stand, one would have to slip sideways through the door into the chair at the desk, hunched before an old Smith-Corona typewriter, an overflowing bright green plastic ashtray, a ragged stack of paper, more books. On the floor, half hidden by books, there was a hot plate, a coffeepot, several fat paper bags. For all practical purposes, Craine decided, this was home for Terrance Rush.

He looked around for a place to wait. Not far off there were brightly colored, plastic-covered chairs, on the wall behind them a thank you for NOT SMOKING sign. He crossed to the nearest chair and sat down facing carrel 34, got his pipe lit, and opened the book on clairvoyance at random. There was a long passage in small print, a quotation. (It sounded