Fourth Mansions, by R.A. Lafferty
Feb. 10th, 2020 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI built this internet so I could tell you about the book which I call Fourth Mansions. When I am done we can go back to the rock where the little snakes wriggle endlessly, which was all we needed before this and all we will need from here on out. It is a strange book. There is none stranger.
(It is worth remembering that I am a liar, but this next part is true: there is a conspiracy which is into the world and against the world, so that the world is like a fish in a net; but perhaps her gills are part of the net too, and would one take the chance of tearing her out of it? Well, isn't a human being a fish without gills, and weren't we set in the mammal line by just such a tearing? Lafferty, in his book which I call Fourth Mansions, wrote down the conspiracy. He did it wrong. That was clever, but they did try to kill him for it anyway, nine times. It was the third time they succeeded and the sixth, but he got away from them that ninth time when they thought they had him all measured up, and so the overbrimming wealthy Plutonian part of him was not killed, though it was that part they were especially aiming for. There are not now nine of the planets, and it is probably for the best, seeing as Lafferty made Pluto so much smaller by his more recent personally-arranged death that it will not fit the planet category. You would have to do another violence to get it in).
Hang on, though, what is this book? There is a man who they try to kill, just like Lafferty, because he asks questions. There are monsters of several kinds, perhaps we can boot them out of history but perhaps that is not the good way to do it. There is fluking like a whale through Apocalypse; there are some thousand persons in the Trinity and badgers, to their sorrow, out of it; there are crackpots, but it is hard to tell how many, or where the hoax got started -- probably right at the beginning. It is not certain I am answering the question.
A few days ago (and this next part is true) I took all the money I had out of the bank and played at poker with it, and I lost every cent. That is not an experience which can be joyful more than once. I will use it for my mandate to write goofily about the book of Lafferty's which I call Fourth Mansions -- although I do not know anyone who calls it anything else, and it was only eighteen hundred cents I lost.
(It is worth remembering that I am a liar, but this next part is true: there is a conspiracy which is into the world and against the world, so that the world is like a fish in a net; but perhaps her gills are part of the net too, and would one take the chance of tearing her out of it? Well, isn't a human being a fish without gills, and weren't we set in the mammal line by just such a tearing? Lafferty, in his book which I call Fourth Mansions, wrote down the conspiracy. He did it wrong. That was clever, but they did try to kill him for it anyway, nine times. It was the third time they succeeded and the sixth, but he got away from them that ninth time when they thought they had him all measured up, and so the overbrimming wealthy Plutonian part of him was not killed, though it was that part they were especially aiming for. There are not now nine of the planets, and it is probably for the best, seeing as Lafferty made Pluto so much smaller by his more recent personally-arranged death that it will not fit the planet category. You would have to do another violence to get it in).
Hang on, though, what is this book? There is a man who they try to kill, just like Lafferty, because he asks questions. There are monsters of several kinds, perhaps we can boot them out of history but perhaps that is not the good way to do it. There is fluking like a whale through Apocalypse; there are some thousand persons in the Trinity and badgers, to their sorrow, out of it; there are crackpots, but it is hard to tell how many, or where the hoax got started -- probably right at the beginning. It is not certain I am answering the question.
A few days ago (and this next part is true) I took all the money I had out of the bank and played at poker with it, and I lost every cent. That is not an experience which can be joyful more than once. I will use it for my mandate to write goofily about the book of Lafferty's which I call Fourth Mansions -- although I do not know anyone who calls it anything else, and it was only eighteen hundred cents I lost.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-10 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-10 02:29 am (UTC)I thought of you when reading it, because there’s a bit in it which makes me think Lafferty read In Search of the Millennium. (And there may be more, since I’ve only read two chapters of that book).
no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 11:54 am (UTC)The reason I have stayed bothered is that I could accurately have said,
‘Someone whose reviews of books I value has found that what I wrote about a book communicated what I wanted it to, more effectively than I'd expected – the book being one I loved reading, and which I’d already failed to describe to two family members on account of its being very strange. I received the message in a park in central Wellington surrounded by pigeons, which made me happy on a stressful afternoon.’
This morning an online conversation gave me a vivid sense of the world as glorious and terrible and wide. It’s not often I’m able to feel those things simultaneously, usually I can only think them; and as a result this, which seemed too small a correction to make... doesn't, because 'too small' doesn't seem a meaningful description. Not on a day with spare time to spend typing, anyway.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-18 05:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-19 01:43 am (UTC)