Verney the Wamplyre: A quotation from a tale.

"There is a painful confusion in my brain, which refuses to delineate distinctly succeeding events.  Some the irradiation of my friend's gentle smile comes before me; and methinks its light spans and fills eternity--then, again, I feel the gasping throes--strewed with foam, and our skiff rose and fell in its increasing furrows.

Behold us now in our frail tenement, hemmed in by hungry, roaring waves, buffeted by winds.  In the inky east two vast clouds, sailing contrary ways, met; the lightning leapt forth, and the hoarse thunder muttered.  Again the south, the clouds replied, and the forked stream of fire, running along the black sky, showed us the appalling piles of clouds, now met and obliterated by the heaving waves.  Great God! And we alone--we three--alone--alone--sole dwellers on the sea and on the earth, we three must perish!  The vast universe, its myriad worlds, and the plains of boundless earth which we had left--the extent of shoreless sea around--contracted to my view--they and all that they contained, shrunk up to one point, even to our tossing bark, freighted with glorious humanity."

-Mary Shelley.

An allegory about the demise of her earlier, her intended, her chosen, her beloved, betaken Percy, said to be "not a strong swimmer".

But a brilliant poet.

I lay me not, as I were, in the dubious air of the afternoon, the heat-warmth, the heart-glow, the insipid questioning of my own nature, the distant bake of outside nature and the contemptuous bed-mattress waiting greedily to take me in and keep me awhile like it was collecting interest on some savings account.

The textbook, the afterthought of some cash-strapped student, come to me secondhand, low on the balance, but dear yet, abruptly stunning the old adage of the dear bought dear, but rather, this was the dear bought rather easily, and not without lacking, well, bought not so dearly.

Funny how the old adages can get broken and beaten by hard reality.

My best of the lot was one that had no requirement on my part, but simply asked me to acknowledge it for the princely sum of one dollar, 2400 pages of classic literature had, in used condition, the name of another in Sharpie across the spine, taken unto me and I was to discover William Blake, Shelley and Wordsworth, which was the great appreciation of the value of but one dollar, almost discarded for some machine-pressed anachronism to sit on a mantel.

But what greater prize, my mantel still, "by what hand? by what art?"

Did he who created that one dollar make thee?  "did he smile his work to see?"

The place at once a rummage, and now a convenience store, and what convenience it was to discover art, and still buy a soda for my refreshment as I coursed the pages; the rummage owners had a buffet plate, made some few dollars from me, the day's entire rummage-store haul, and the balance was blown on a plush lunch.

I lunched yet more plush, on my pages, no matter what I would chose for my dinner; for I lunched in the mind, and the mind of course, is both the key and the doorway to a realm of freedom.