Quote thoughts

They ain't real, I thought as I walked down the hall, nary one. But I knew they were. You come into a strange place, into a town like Mason City, and they don't seem real, but you know they are. You know they went wading in the creek when they were kids, and when they were bigger they used to go out about sunset and lean on the back fence and look across the country at the sky and not know what was happening inside them or whether they were happy or sad, and when they got grown they slept with their wives and tickled their babies to make them laugh and went to work in the morning and didn't know what they wanted but had their reasons for doing things and wanted to do good things, because they always gave good reasons for the things they did, and then when they got old they lost their reasons for doing anything and sat on the bench in front of their harness shop and had words for the reasons other people had but had forgotten what the reasons were. And then they will lie in bed some morning just before day and look up at the ceiling they can scarcely see because the lamp is shaded with a pinned-on newspaper and they don't recognize the faces around the bed any more because the room is full of smoke, or fog, and it makes their eyes burn and gets in the throat. Oh, they are real, all right, and it may be the reason they don't seem real to you is that you aren't very real yourself.

-All the King's Men, 57-58

I've been thinking about Nabokov today, so this passage brings to mind a butterfly pinned to a board. A human's created here, but at a distance with a scientific objectiveness to common experience.

If I explain myself, it will only tell you more about me by reminding you that I'm human. It's not who played with me on the playground as a child that defines me, it's that I played, that a past exists at all. I can think of myself as a set of Matryoshka dolls, with smaller "Mes" nestled inside each new version until one doll is visible. And all the dolls exist in me but for the most part only one matters, the visible one. As a writer of other characters, what's the point of explaining the exact patterns and colors on the smallest doll's dress when you can just open up yourself and look at your own? To get others to do the same.