Afterword
The author shares, in the following, his perspectives on the background that drove the writing of this landscape story.
Inexorably, by the force of gravity alone, everybody is required, to experience landscape…to travel a singularly personal landscape path. Landscape is thus, not a marketing option. Landscape is inextricable from life. It is essential to life. Discover it, uniquely, in the author’s stories.
Whilst all of the author’s efforts are fiction, they do contain certain coincidental geographical hand holds in time and space. These hand holds enable contact to that personal experience we all refer to as, reality. These hand holds have been included as starting points for the readers…windows from which to hanker and lament, doors through which to adjust their own landscape paths…
Readers will kindly note that the English used in this story is an unpredictable mashup of English language varieties including:
- American Midwest
- English Home Counties
- Old British Commonwealth
- International English, and, the geographically unique varieties of,
- Pidgin English, from the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian sub-Continent and South East Asia
There will be linguistic ambiguities in the reading…these reflect the daily life experience in the geography of the story.
Within the myriad of fragments, of samples, that make up every moment of our waking lives…sounds, sights, tastes, smells, touches, thoughts, dreams, memories…we are trapped. We are trapped by complex interweaving duality rhythms of work-home, daytime-night time, hankering-lamenting.
We are trapped by those rhythms that deny us the chance to step back and look at larger pictures of time, at larger patterns of fragments. We are young, then old. We are healthy, then sick. We are trapped by past decisions and future expectations.
These inundations of fragments, of samples, and the imposed constraints, together provide an inescapable background noise in our daily lives. This noise is sometimes comforting, sometimes threatening, sometimes a woven pleasure, sometimes barely noticeable…but each of us builds up a history of noise and each of us lives with it, continuously.
There are some places where the noise and the entrapments of life transform. These are large places, landscapes. These are small places, gardens. These are quiet places. These are places that transform, places that have promise, places where the noise and entrapments of life may recede and be supplanted by…an internal plea rarely shaped into words…please let it last…
The author writes little stories about the little things that happen in everyone’s life. He writes them in a perspective which he hopes will entertain readers. But at the edges, and popping up sometimes in the very centers of these little everyday things, are the timeless allegories, opportunities, samples, fragments, windows, doors, links, which challenge human thought, challenge that special core in the human heart.
These landscape stories are fragments along the path of each reader.
Along the paths, it is about search and discovery.
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The Author, Edward Flaherty
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