815: An aside . . .
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 13
13
AN ASIDE on the subject of the compulsion to tell a story. When, as a small child, I couldn’t get to sleep at night, my mother, after she tired of reading to me or just talking with me in the dark, used to tell me, “Make up a story for yourself.” Latterly, I find that the child’s solution has become the adult’s problem, and I now have to figure out how to stop making up stories so that I can get to sleep.
ANOTHER ASIDE, on shells as a concept. I promised myself that I would resist the temptation to elaborate here the parallels between the mansion’s shell and the shell of a clam, but I find that I have to say, at least, “Hey, look: the mansion’s shell, sheltering and protecting the fragile hope that the future would hold an interesting life, would bring more stories, is very like the clam’s shell, sheltering and protecting the clam itself, which has always seemed to me to be a creature very much like hope: soft, vulnerable, chewy, tasty.”
[to be continued]
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