John Gardner

(Talking, talking. Spinning a web of words, pale walls of dreams, between myself and all I see.)

I am not the only monster on these moors.

I met an old woman as wild as the wind

Striding in white out of midnight's den.

Her cloak was in rags, and her flesh, it was lean,

And her eyes, her murdered eyes...

"He reshapes the world," I whispered, belligerent. "So his name implies. He stares strange-eyed at the mindless world and turns dry sticks to gold."

"It is I," I say. "The Destroyer."

(O hear me, rocks and trees, loud waterfalls! You imagine I tell you these thing just to hear myself speak? A little respect there, brothers and sisters!

"That night, for the first time, I saw men."

I will count my numberless blessings one by one.

I. My teeth are sound.

I. The roof of my cave is sound.

I. I have not committed the ultimate act of nihilism: I have not killed the queen.

I. Yet.

And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war. The pain of it! The stupidity!

“Nevertheless, something will come of all this,” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “A brief pulsation in the black hole of eternity. My advice to you—”

“Wait and see,” I said.

He shook his head. “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it.”

Tedium is the worst pain.

"Hey!" he yelled. A forgivable lapse.

"Personally," he said, "my great ambition is to count all this," --he waved vaguely at the treasure around him--"and possibly sort it into piles."