Quote:He was especially fond, as many of us are, of Mary Webb's "Precious
Bane".
I wonder whether he read and was equally fond of her novel
The House in Dormer Forest? The closing lines of the first chapter are especially superb, and seem resonant with CAS's own perspective:
Quote:For it does not seem that Nature, as some divines would have us think, was built to stage man's miracle plays, or created as an illustration of his various religions. Nature takes no account of man and his curious arts, his weird worships, but remains dark and unresponsive, beetling upon him as he creeps, ant-like, from his momentary past to his doubtful future, painfully carrying his tiny load of knowledge. But indifference is not hampering, as interference is; therefore those that feel within them the stir of a growing soul prefer the dour laws of earth to the drag of the herd of mankind, and fly from the house of man to the forest, where the emotionless silence always seems to be gathering, as waves mount and swell, to the disclosure of a mystery.