The Little Country

by Charles de Lint (read Nov 2003)
This is a story-within-a-story. The encompassing story is about a young adult woman, Janey Little, who discovers a hidden manuscript written by one of her favorite authors and hidden among her father's possessions. As she reads the manuscript mysterious and dangerous events start to take place in her real life and in the book.

. . .just as soon as something new came up, whatever Janey had been thinking of earlier would find itself put awayinto a little box and then stored off somewhere in the mddle that was her mind, haphazardly stacked up with all the other boxes of ragtag odds and ends by which Janey compartmentalized her memories.

I liked this quote because it reminded me of what I do, except that I put my boxes on shelves. I remember when all the kids finished grade school I was so excited to put the 'box' of Halloween parades on a shelf located in a really dark corner of my mind. Eleven years later when I found out I was expecting, I groaned because I had to get that darn Halloween box down.

"And what makes me feel worse," Janey said, "is all those times I've seen him up on the cliffs and either laughed at the way he looked, or ran off scared. I culd have known him all this time."

This was the real magic to which he was heir: the understanding that neither logic nor emotion on its own was enough to keep a man's soul pure, and thereby at the peak of it power. The mind narrowed and blocked the world into understandable packages with which it could deal, but the soul required a broader view, one that incompassed both the microcosm of the mind's perceptions as well as the macrocosm of the world as a whole with which it must interact. Less than a perfect harmony of the 2 left one crippled.

The years of study are what prepares a person to be responsible.

"our worlds need each other," Edern said. "They grow too far apart now and we suffer for it - both our worlds suffer. Their separation makes for a disharmony that reflects in each of them. Your world grows ever more regimented and orderly; soon it will lose all of its ability to imagine, to know enchantment, to be joyful for no other reason than that its people perceive the wonder of the world they are blessed to live in. Everything is put in boxes and compartmentalized and a grey pall hangs over the minds of its people. Your world will eventually become so drab and drear that its people will eventually destroy it through sheer blindness and ignorance."

"And your world?"
"Grows too fey. Magics run amuck. Anything that can be imagined, is, and if left unchecked, my world will simply dissolve into chaos."

de Lint also had quotes from other sources at the beginning of each chapter. One of my favorites was from Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher.

Sometimes I feel like I've got my nose pressed up against the window of a bakery, only I'm the bread.