All I Knew Was That I Would

Contemporary Fantasists All Bow Politely To Lord Tennyson And Papa Tolkien, Then Step Around Them To Go Back To The Original Texts For Inspiration--and There Are A Lot Of Those Texts. We Have King Arthur And His Gang In English; We've Got Siegfried And Brunhild In German; Charlemagne And Roland In French; El Cid In Spanish; Sigurd The Volsung In Icelandic; And Assorted 'myghtiest Knights On Lyfe' In A Half-dozen Other Cultures. Without Shame, We Pillage Medieval Romance For All We're Worth.

When You Get Down To The Bottom Of It, Only About Half Of What We Remember Really Happened. We Tend To Modify Things To Make Ourselves Look Better In Our Own Eyes And In The Eyes Of Others. Then, If What We Did Wasn't Really Very Admirable, We Tend To Forget That It Ever Happened. A Normal Human Being's Grasp On Reality Is Very Tenuous At Best. Our Imaginary Lives Are Usually Much Nicer.

As Soon As A Friendship Passed A Certain Point - Some Obscure And Secret Boundary - A Woman Quite Automatically Became Overwhelmed By A Raging Compulsion To Complicate Things.

It's Gaudy, Ugly, And In Terribly Bad Taste. It Does, However, Suit My Personality Almost Perfectly.

But There's A World Beyond What We Can See And Touch, And That World Lives By Its Own Laws. What May Be Impossible In This Very Ordinary World Is Very Possible There, And Sometimes The Boundaries Between The Two Worlds Disappear, And Then Who Can Say What Is Possible And Impossible?