Imagination

The trouble is I have always been able to imagine almost anything. It has been my downfall.

-Frederick Buechner, The Storm, 4.

We Make Because We are Made

...To quote a brief passage from a letter I once wrote to a man who described myth and fairy-story as “lies”...

“Dear Sir,” I said—“Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons—’twas our right
(used or misued). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we’re made.”

...Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

-J. R. R. Tolkein, “On Fairy-stories,” A Tolkein Miscellany, 127.

Preamble

If all the characters in this book are fictional, none of them knows it yet.

All resemblances to actual persons were preordained before the creation of the world. It matters little that the names don't always match.

All the incidents and dialogue come straight from God's imagination. As does the author himself. And the reader.

-Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana