Among Others

It’s about nuclear war and Dutch elm disease and how we should actually be getting into space while we can.
    There’s apparently a long T. S. Eliot poem called Four Quartets which the school doesn’t have. I’ll order that on Saturday as well. According to Miss Carroll, T. S. Eliot worked in a bank when he was writing The Waste Land because being a poet doesn’t pay.
    “Oh dark, dark, dark … those are pearls that were his eyes … With these fragments have I shored up my ruins.”
    F RIDAY 9 TH N OVEMBER 1979
    It doesn’t seem so terrible that the elms are dying when it’s autumn and all the trees seem dead.
    Another letter. I’m going to have to burn them again. I almost want to know if she’s said anything about what I did. I’d like to have confirmation. Though I know it worked.
    I handed my poem in. Miss Lewes looked at it but didn’t say anything. Miss Gilbert, who teaches English to the Sixth Form, will be judging.
    I’m hoping there’ll be some books waiting for me at the library tomorrow, because I’m almost through with what I have. I’m reading Nine Princes in Amber again.
    I keep dreaming about Mor. I dream she’s drowning and I don’t save her. I dream I push her in front of the car instead of trying to pull her away. It hit both of us. I have a reminder of that in every step I take, but not in my dreams. I dream I’m burying her alive in the centre of the labyrinth, throwing earth down on top of her while she struggles and it gets in her hair.
    It was a year ago today. I’ve been trying not to think about it, but it keeps ambushing me.
    S ATURDAY 10 TH N OVEMBER 1979
    Going into town on the bus, the anticipation of the library filled me with delight. It almost made the wet grey streets nice, but not quite. It was drizzling, and the sky was very low and flat.
    The librarian, the man, was a little startled at how many books I wanted to order, but he just gave me a pile of blanks and had me fill them in myself. Lots of books were waiting for me! Then I went down to the bookshop and bought Four Quartets , Ted Hughes’s Crow and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsinger . I also bought a box of matches.
    I did not buy a book called Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson, which has the temerity to compare itself, on the front cover, to “Tolkien at his best.” The back cover attributes the quote to the Washington Post , a newspaper whose quotations will always damn a book for me from now on. How dare they? And how dare the publishers? It isn’t a comparison anyone could make, except to say “Compared to Tolkien at his best, this is dross.” I mean you could say that even about really brilliant books like A Wizard of Earthsea . I expect Lord Foul’s Bane (horrible title, sounds like a Conan book) is more like Tolkien at his worst, which would be the beginning of The Silmarillion .
    The thing about Tolkien, about The Lord of the Rings , is that it’s perfect. It’s this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It’s not, I’m pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it changes everything. I remember finishing The Hobbit and handing it to Mor and saying “Read it. It’s pretty good. Isn’t there another one of these around here somewhere?” And I remember finding it—stealing it from my mother’s room. When the door was open, the light from the corridor fell on the shelves R and S and T. We were always afraid to go further in, in case she was hiding in the darkness and grabbed us. She did that once, when Mor was putting back The Crystal Cave . When we took one of her books, usually, we ruffled the shelf so it wouldn’t show. But the one-volume Lord of the Rings was so fat that it didn’t work. I was terrified she’d see. I almost didn’t take it. But either she didn’t notice or she didn’t care—I think she might have been away with one of her boyfriends.
    I haven’t said what I wanted to about the thing about it.
    Reading it is like being there. It’s like finding a magic spring in a desert. It has everything. (Except lust, Daniel said. But it has Wormtongue .)
    It is an oasis for the soul. Even now I can always retreat into Middle Earth and be happy.
    How can you compare anything to that? I can’t believe Stephen Donaldson’s hubris.
    S UNDAY 11 TH N OVEMBER 1979
    I climbed out of the dorm window in the middle of the night last night and made a circle and burned the letters in it. Nobody