/lit/ - Literature

Although this book purports to be the biography of the venerable Maestro, I must confess to you, dear reader, that I know very little of his life. During the course of our wanderings and misadventures I was afforded only rare vantages of his past. He was a maelstrom which one scoured for the faint flitting of hummingbird wings, a suit of well varnished armor whose immaculate defenses were interrupted by only the most infinitesimal of cracks. If one blinked one was sure to miss them; and young as I was during my apprenticeship with the Maestro, I can only wonder what tantalizing traces of his inner world went beyond my limited powers of perception. He spoke, it seemed to me, as if his mouth was full of milk and honey: his words were sometimes intoxicating, frequently light, intermittently profound, and always delightful. Some of the things that he said might stick in one’s mind for days, some for years; yet other things, like flowing milk, had a way of seeping through the seams without detection, leaving only the barest suggestion that they had ever been there. This, I suspect, was the crux of his genius—a sort of artful deflection. And yet he did leave, like a painter who secrets his own likeness in a chapel frieze, fragments of himself behind, though some were only visible with the aid of a mirror. For that reason I think after all that he was indeed a human man (and sometimes woman), not some djinn that had escaped from its bottle and loosed its mystery upon the world.