/lit/ - Literature

I thought Borges and Kafka were the greatest short story writers. But then I read this. Stone Quarry is some next level metafictional shit. Uuooohhh!

>>21823719
You owe it yourself

>>21656992

>>21605248
Still, they had seen a land of some sort. That land was, in their own words, a place for farms and even, perhaps, a village. It would have been more in keeping with the scope of the dream surrounding them had they talked of founding an unheard-of city where they stood. But all their schemes were alike from our point of view. Villages or cities were all in the realm of possibility and could never have a real existence. The land would remain the land, designed for us yet, at the same time, providing the scenery for the dreams of a people who would never see either our land or any land they dreamed of.

What could we do, knowing what we then knew? We seemed as helpless as those characters we remembered from private dreams who tried to run with legs strangely nerveless. Yet if we had no choice but to complete the events of the dream, we could still admire the marvellous inventiveness of it. And we could wonder endlessly what sort of people they were in their far country, dreaming of a possible land they could never inhabit, dreaming further of a people such as ourselves with our one weakness, and then dreaming of acquiring from us the land which could never exist.

We decided, of course, to abide by the transaction that had been so neatly contrived. And although we knew we could never truly awake from a dream that did not belong to us, still we trusted that one day we might seem, to ourselves at least, to awake.

Some of us, remembering how after dreams of loss they had awakened with real tears in their eyes, hoped that we would somehow awake to be convinced of the genuineness of the steel in our hands and the wool round our shoulders. Others insisted that for as long as we handled such things we could be no more than characters in the vast dream that had settled over us—the dream that would never end until a race of men in a land unknown to us learned how much of their history was a dream that must one day end.

In my classroom, fourteen years before my son’s seventh year, I devised projects that encouraged the children to write about themselves. I wanted to know what memories of joy or sorrow were already stored in the children’s hearts. I wondered what my favourite children dreamed about when I caught them gazing into the air.

One day I announced to my class that I had found a pen-friend for each of them in New Zealand. I announced that each child in my class would prepare during English periods for the next two weeks a long letter to be sent to his or her pen-friend. Each child would prepare as well, for sending with the letter to New Zealand, drawings and perhaps a photograph of the writer of the letter with family and friends and pets. When every child of the forty-eight children in the class had prepared his or her letter and accompanying material, I announced, I would make up a parcel and post it to a certain teacher in a large school in New Zealand. That teacher would distribute our letters among the children in his school. A few weeks later I would receive from New Zealand a parcel comprising a letter for each child in my class from a child in New Zealand, together with drawings and perhaps photographs.

The teacher in New Zealand was a man I had met two years before when he had been in Melbourne under the terms of a teacher-exchange scheme. Just before he had left Melbourne he had given me his address in New Zealand and had suggested that we should pair our pupils as pen-friends each year. In the first year after the man had gone back to New Zealand I had not taken his suggestion, but in the second year I suddenly thought of all the words that my pupils would write about themselves after I had told them that a class of children in New Zealand was waiting to read letters from them.

I ought to have checked first with the teacher in New Zealand before I began the project, but I was eager for my children to begin writing. After they had been writing for a week, I wrote a note to the New Zealand teacher to tell him that a parcel of children’s letters would soon reach him. When I was ready to post the note to New Zealand I could not find the address of the teacher in New Zealand. I found in the notebook where I kept addresses the names and addresses of people I could not remember having met, but I could not find the address of the teacher in New Zealand, and he was the only person I knew who lived in New Zealand.

>During the years when I bought many books and when some of those books would stay on my shelves unread for many years while I read the many other books waiting to be read, I would sometimes stand in front of my shelves and would look at the spine of a book that I had owned for many years but had not yet read and would see in my mind a sequence of images of the images that I might have seen in my mind if I had read the book and had later remembered having done so.

>During the hour mentioned in the previous paragraph, the younger of the two men mentioned in that paragraph looked into a small cupboard of steel that stood beside the bed where his father appeared to be asleep in the room mentioned in the same paragraph. Among the things that the younger man saw in the cupboard just mentioned was a man’s dressing-gown rolled into a bundle with the cord of the dressing-gown tied loosely around the bundle. While the man just mentioned was looking at the tassels on the ends of the cord just mentioned, he supposed for the first time in his life that the dressing-gown mentioned earlier in this story as having been worn often by the mother of the man in the first year that he afterwards remembered had belonged not to his mother but to his father; that the dressing-gown just mentioned had been bought by his father during one of the many years when he had been a bachelor; and that the mother of the man had worn the dressing gown often during a number of years because she and her husband and their two sons had been poor during those years.

Better than Borges, Kafka, Nabokov.