Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Extract
John Gardner, Grendel
The dragon tipped up his great tusked head, stretched his neck, sighed fire. 'Ah, Grendel!' he said. He seemed that instant to rise almost to pity. 'You improve them, my boy! Can't you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion and all that they are as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves. The exile, captivity, death they shrink from - the blunt facts of their mortality, their abandonment - that's what you make them recognise, embrace! You are mankind, or man's condition : inseparable as the mountain-climber and the mountain. If you withdraw, you'll instantly be replaced. Brute existents, you know, are a dime a dozen. No sentimental trash, then. If man's the irrelevance that interests you, stick with him! Scare him to glory! Its all the same in the end, matter or motion, simple and complex. No difference finally. Death, transfiguration. Ashes to ashes and slime to slime, Amen.'
John Gardner, Grendel
