props to Wallace Stevens.
Excerpts from preface of The Sandman, Book of Dreams.
To be conscious a all is to be conscious of time, and of time’s arrond: of destiny. And to know that is to know that time must have a sto: to imagine death. Faced with the certainty of death, we dream, imagine paradises where it might not be so: “Death is the mother of beauty,” wrote Wallace Stevens. And all dreams, all myths, all the structures we throw up between ourselves and chaos, just because they are built things, must inevitably be destroyed. And we turn, desperate in our loss, to the preishable but delicious joy of the moment, we desire. All desire is, of course the hope for a fulfillment impossible in every nature of things, a boundless delightl; so to desire is always already to despair, to realize that the wished-for delight is only, after all, the delirium of our mrotal self-delusion that the world is large enough to fit the mind. And so we return to new stories — to dream.
and also, another lovely sentence from the preface,
“In the beginning, God made man?” Quite and quite precisely– the reverse.
I have always loved Gaiman’s work, since i was a young, when i was exposed to his Sandman comic in the papers. I grew up, got separated from the comic and of recent years, i began, to start reading his works again. and thus, the romance restarted with American Gods, Anansi Boys, Good Omen’s,Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book and a full circle later, back to The Sandman.