I decided to unearth an old piece I wrote about him, in the spirit of celebration. It’s called “Waiting for Norman Rush”. Re-reading it, I realize that – I sound very sad. Like … very sad. Not sure what was going on there, or why I was so sad … but I certainly would not write the essay in the same way now. HOWEVER, that’s part of the lasting hold that Rush and his first novel have on me. When I’m sad and haunted and yearning … the book is relevant. When I’m pissed off and bitter – the book is relevant. When I am looking to escape into my intellectual pursuits – the book is relevant. Weird. Not too many books do that. Not too many books travel with you through your life.
People who love the book Mating: A Novel
I have gone out in search of the positive reviews of this book – so that I could hang out with my own kind: those who not only loved this book, but who felt it was, in some way, really important. No other book like it, really. The vocabulary is daunting but for me that was part of the FUN (I get into that in my essay below). I kept a running list of words to look up – and also – as a lover of the Latin language (as a Latin lover??) – the book was SO fun. The text is peppered with Latin phrases, some of which I knew, some of which I had no idea … but tracking down the references was a blast.
It may sound like an arduous read – but for me, that is not a bad thing. It never has been. I enjoy “hard” reads. It’s all part of the life I have set up for myself – of intellectual challenge and rigor. I enjoy reading books that require something of the reader. I enjoy books that are experiences. (Since I was a kid this has been true. Which was why I read All the President’s Men at age 12, why I read Oliver Twist at age 10 … That sort of need to challenge myself has always been there.) I like books that take up a whole SEASON in my life. For instance: I remember “the summer when I read Ulysses for the first time”. I remember the freezing fall and winter “when I read Moby Dick“. I remember the spring AND summer when I read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. And I remember where I was, and what I was doing in my life, when I first read Mating. It was in my first apartment in Chicago (the one with the creaky elevator, where I had no furniture but a mattress – for MONTHS). That was where I read Mating. Since then I’ve read it probably – 10 times? But I’ll get to that.
I came across this wonderful review of it on Amazon, which is kind of creepy – in that I feel like I could have written every word of it:
I took forever deciding whether I should read Mating, whether I wanted to commit my time to such a long and apparently difficult book, whether it would be worth it in the end. I thought about buying it a number of times, but couldn’t get up the courage — what if it just gathered dust on a shelf? I borrowed a copy from the library, finally, and promised myself that if I hated it (as a number of my friends had) I would abandon it quickly.
Now Mating is one of the few books I would want to have with me on a desert island. I can easily, happily say it was one of the great reading experiences of my life so far. But it’s also a book that seems tailor-made to my sensibilities, as if somebody asked me, “What would you like a big novel to contain?” and then set out to write it.
There’s a compelling narrative voice. There’s tremendous erudition, so I felt like I learned something about the world on every page. There’s a careful attention to language, and yet the language is free and full to bursting. There’s all sorts of talk about politics, the history of leftist political movements (particularly anarcho-syndicalism, my own favorite), and utopia. There’s a love story, but it’s written about without mushy romantic spewings. There’s an exotic locale. I’m a happy reader!
But you won’t like this book if you’re looking for a standard storyline and if you don’t have patience for intellectual dialogues scattered throughout the action and if you want clean and unambiguous answers to everything. You also won’t like it if you demand that first person narrators be always appealing. I found the narrator often annoying, but in the end was quite glad to have known her.
To have known her — yes, by the end you speak of the narrator and her obsession and love, Nelson Denoon, as people you have known. (Or perhaps I shouldn’t use the second-person here, since I know people who do not agree with me, who found the characters simply exasperating. So let me rephrase: I felt like I had known them.)
If you’re fairly well-read, you can test whether you’re going to find this book stunning or frustrating by playing a cross-referencing mindgame of this sort: Imagine that James Joyce finished Ulysses and was annoyed that his writing hadn’t tackled all of the problems of human civilizations. Just then, a time warp appeared, and Paulo Freire and Emma Goldman stepped out and lectured Joyce for 40 days and 40 nights. He was thrilled. He began to write and discovered that a small part of his talent had been taken over by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and another part by Don DeLillo. Ben Okri had found his way in there somewhere, too. Writing was hard with all those different voices pulling at him, but he got through, and the book he produced was Mating.
If the names above are unfamiliar to you, then ask yourself how you felt while reading it. If you made it through to this paragraph, and you’re not mad at me for inserting the above (in fact, you found it piqued your curiosity), then you’ll do just fine with Mating, and you may be deeply grateful, as I am, that Norman Rush had the courage and genius to write it.
Ha!! Yes!
Anyway, without further ado – and I’ll probably write more on this – I’ll never be done discussing Mating – here’s the piece I wrote 3 years ago: Waiting for Norman Rush.
Waiting for Norman Rush
Me being me, I have to back up a couple of days to tell the story fully. Actually, this is already inaccurate. I have to back up many years.
The journey begins in 1992 when I first read the novel Mating, by Norman Rush. I thought it was just another novel – but now I can see that the book has become a part of my mental landscape, a part of how I interpret events.
Today, that book is dog-eared from use. The cover is taped on. The pages are filled with underlinings. And in the back, on the couple of blank pages, I have crammed up that blank space with as many dictionary definitions of words found in this book as I could. The vocabulary in the book is, as my friend Allison called it, “daunting”. I agree, and I have a pretty good vocabulary.
ressentiment: rancor expressed covertly against benefactors
proleptic: the anticipating/answering of objective/argument before it’s put forward
omphalog: the naval/a center
copula: a verb that identifies the predicate of sentence with subject — usually a form of ‘to be’. “The girls are beautiful”
syncretist: attempt/tendency to combine or reconcile differing beliefs (philosophy or religion)
bolus: a small round mass. Greek: lump/clod
Expanding my vocabulary was part of the fascination of the book.
But the hold Mating had, and still has on me, goes way deeper than that.
The characters in the book (mainly the two leads: Nelson Denoon and the unnamed female narrator) live on in my mind, the way characters like Holden Caulfield do. Or Captain Ahab. Or Anna Karenina. Their life, their potential life, does not stop with the words “The End”. You cannot tell me that Holden does not live. It seems an insult to Salinger’s creation.
There must be an alternate plane out in the ether, with fictional characters wandering about. Not every fictional character, because not every author manages to create a living, breathing, human personality. Actually, “human” is too limiting as well. Because, to my mind, Charlotte the spider (from EB White’s Charlotte’s Web) lives on as well. She exists on that alternate plane. As does Wilbur the pig. It’s sort of like the plot of The Velveteen Rabbit. Once the rabbit is loved, and loved deeply, it becomes real.
Nelson Denoon is real. Because I love him.
Mating is, on the surface, the story of a love affair. Other themes are: what to do about Africa, the problems with “development projects” and do-gooders in Africa, socialism in Africa, differences between men and women, competition between females for males (hence, the title), satirical observations about the ridiculous-ness of most of academania – and then, more specifically, an in-depth description of the world of Botswana: the diplomatic community in Gaborone, the issues with “villagization”, the issues with development, how the development community lives high on the hog in Africa – etc. It’s a BIG book, with BIG themes.
The main theme is something the author/narrator calls “intellectual love”. Rush describes a very specific kind of love, and because he did so, and took such care with it, the concept became real to me. He articulated one of my deepest longings in a way I had never before encountered. It was like his words illuminated my own needs.
My utopia is equal love, equal love between people of equal value, although value is an approximation for the word I want. Why is it so difficult? Assortative mating shows there has to be some drive in nature to bring equals together in the toils of love, so why even in the most enlightened and beautifully launched unions are we afraid we hear the master-slave relationship moving its slow thighs somewhere in the vicinity? It has to be cultural. In fact the closest thing to a religion I have is that this has to be cultural. I could do practically anything while he was asleep and not bother him. I wrote in my journal, washed dishes in slow motion if we hadn’t gotten around to them. I was emotional a lot, privately. I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.
“I wanted to incorporate everything, understand everything, because time is cruel and nothing stays the same.”
God. Yes.
More:
He was appropriate for me and the reverse. I felt it and hated it because it was true despite his being around fifteen years older than me. What did that mean about me? I also hated it because I hate assortative mating, the idea of it. One of my most imperishable objections to the world is the existence of assortative mating, how everyone at some level ends up physically with just who they deserve, at least to the eye of some ideal observer, unless money or power deforms the process. This is equivalent to being irritated at photosynthesis or at inhabiting a body that has to defecate periodically, I am well aware. Mostly it comes down to the matching of faces. When I first encountered the literature, I even referred to it privately as faceism. I will never adapt to it, probably. Why can’t every mating in the world be on the basis of souls instead of inevitably and fundamentally on the match between physical envelopes? Of course we all know the answer, which is that otherwise we would be throwing evolution into disarray. Still it distresses me. We know what we are.
A couple of people I recommended this book to were extremely annoyed by the writing-voice, as evidenced in the passage above. But I love the voice of the narrator. It is cerebral, obsessively psychological, yearning, illogical — It comes from right out of me. I relate. On some level, that is how I talk. Here’s more. The book is encyclopedic on love.
If I overdwell on this it can’t be helped: love is important and the reasons you get it or fail are important. The number of women in my generation who in retrospect anyone will apply the term “great love” to, in any connection, is going to be minute. I needed to know if I had a chance here. Love is strenuous. Pursuing someone is strenuous. What I say is if you find yourself condemned to wanting love, you have to play while you can play. Of course it would be so much easier to play from the male side. They never go after love qua love, ever. They go after women. And for men love is the distillate or description of whatever happened with each woman that as not actually painful in feeling-tone. there is some contradiction here which I can’t expel. What was moving me was the feeling of being worth someone’s absolute love, great love, even. And to me this means male love whether I like it or not. C’est ca. Here I am, there I was. I don’t know if getting love out of a man is more of a feat of strength now than it used to be or not, except that I do: it is. It’s hideous. It’s an ordeal beyond speech. When I’m depressed I feel like what was meant by one of his favorite quotations: A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it. Men are like armored things, mountainous assemblages of armor and leather, masonry even, which you are told will self-dismantle if you touch the right spot, and out will flow passionate attention. And we know that this sometimes does happen for one of our sisters, or has happened. This comes full circle back to my attitude about kissing, which he never adjusted to. You want kisses, obviously. But you want kisses from a source, a person, who is in a state. This is why the plague of little moth kisses from men just planting their seniority on you is so intolerable. Of course even as I was machinating I was well aware I was in the outskirts of the suburb of the thing you want or suspect is there. But at this moment in my life I was at the point where even the briefest experience of unmistakable love would be something I could clutch to myself as proof that my theory of myself was not incorrect. Theories can be reactionary and still applicable.
And now, here is Rush’s (or his nameless female narrator’s) treatise on intellectual love. It is the concept articulated here, the concept of ‘intellectual love’ which, for me, when I first read it, was like a lightbulb going on, or a door opening. I saw something within myself in a clear open light.
Intellectual love is not the same animal as landing a mentor, although women I’ve raised the construct with want to reduce it to that. I distrust and shun the whole mentor concept, which is just as well since I seem not to attract them. Nelson was not my mentor, ever. I gave as well as I got, with him. But there was intellectual love on my part, commencing circa that night.
Intellectual love is a particular hazard for educated women, I think. Certain conditions have to obtain. You meet someone — I would specify of the opposite sex, but this is obviously me being hyperparochial — who strikes you as having persuasive and wellfounded answers to questions on the order of Where is the world going? These are distinctly not meaning-of-life questions. One thing Denoon did convince me of is that all answers so far to the question What is the meaning of life? dissolve into ascertaining what some hypostatized superior entity wants you to be doing, id est ascertaining how, and to whom or what, you should be in an obedience relationship. The proof of this is that no one would ever say, if he or she had been convinced that life was totally random and accidental in origin and evolution, that he or she had found the meaning of life. So, fundamentally, intellectual love is for a secular mind, because if you discover someone, however smart, is — he has neglected to mention — a Thomist or in Baha’i, you think of him as a slave to something uninteresting.
What beguiles you toward intellectual love is the feeling of observing a mental searchlight lazily turning here and there and lighting up certain parts of the landscape you thought might be dubious or fraudulent but lacked the time or energy to investigate or the inner authority to dismiss tout court. The searchlight confirms you.
In an interview, Norman Rush says:
I regard Mating as a true novel, but one that is essentially comic and based around a story of adventure and a passionate love relationship. That’s the vehicle I used to explore very important moral questions, like What is good life? What is a justified life? Why is there so much lying in society? Who are the liars, and how much lying is socially necessary? The idea was to use a story of adventure and an exotic setting and a character who was relentlessly questioning, as a framework for these other issues.
But the central point I wanted to be clear about in the writing was the importance of intellectual content in a love relationship. That was something I wanted very much to keep compelling. She becomes interested in “Denoon” because he is a moral activist engaged in the epochal enterprise of trying to do good in some practical sense. Because she herself is more jaundiced; there’s something about this that creates a great attraction, and awakens a side of her that the world hasn’t been so likely to acknowledge. As part of the first wave of post-Betty Friedan feminism, she operates with all the strength and vitality that brought. But she’s a romantic, too; and a part of what she’s doing is attempting to interrogate romance. She both partakes of it and doubts it. One of the ways to look at her pursuit of “Denoon” is as an effort to prove or disprove the equation that a consummate relationship with a man is possible.
To me, the book has it all. It has the love story, it has the intellectual questions I find interesting, it takes on big issues – and it also, in parts, is laugh-out-loud funny. Like – I find the narrator’s voice inherently funny. Even when she is at her most manic.
Mating was the context in which I went through my major love affair, with a man who shall remain nameless, ahem. My friend Mitchell, who also read and loved the book Mating , referred to this man in my life as “your Nelson Denoon”. “You know who he is, don’t you, Sheila? He’s your Nelson Denoon.” The similarities were arresting, even down to the dogmatic anti-clerical attitude. But more than that – it was how she (the narrator) set her sights on Nelson Denoon almost from the start … and how I had done the same thing. It wasn’t just that I wanted it to happen. It is that it had to happen. And when everything fell apart with “my Nelson Denoon”, leaving a nightmare in its wake that lasted, pretty much, for years, that book became even more of an anchor. I looked for words of truth in it, I looked for hope, I tried to tell myself “it all happens for a reason” (bah), I read it and re-read it, making myself stronger – making myself believe, yet again, that not only was that kind of love possible (of course it was – I felt it) – but … it could happen again.
In the past couple of weeks, I took Mating out to read again.
It is a first novel, and what a first novel. Mating was a huge hit, financially and critically, it won the National Book Award in 1991. Rush clearly put everything he knows about everything into that book. In that interview I linked to above, Rush says (and I love this – it makes me feel brave):
Mating is the culmination of my writing life to date. The reaction to it has exceeded my greatest hopes and expectations. I was able to take the risks I needed to take, and am still overwhelmed with the fact I got away with it.
Ha!
The book is about love, obviously, but it’s also about Africa, and politics, and socialism, and the position of women in Africa, and religion (what happens when 2 logical intellectual and – above all else – RATIONAL people fall in love? And also – what happens when one of them has an unexpected religious – or spiritual – epiphany? What will the fallout be? How does a logical scholarly type understand – or even ALLOW – mystery, the unknowable, the unanswerable? These are questions that have deep resonance for me. They seem to come from me – like the Amazon reviewer said:
But it’s also a book that seems tailor-made to my sensibilities, as if somebody asked me, “What would you like a big novel to contain?” and then set out to write it.
And the ending.
The last section, a kind of epilogue, is called “About the Foregoing”. It is very mysterious. It ends on a very ambiguous note.
She has left Africa, and has left Denoon, her great love. Things have fallen apart. Denoon has gone mad. She is now trying to get her life together when suddenly she gets a mysterious message, telling her to come back to Africa. It is not Denoon who calls her. It is a woman. She does not know who this woman could be. Or why she has been summoned. She obsesses about it, wondering what to do. Should she return? What would be waiting for her in Africa? If Denoon did not summon her, then perhaps she would not be welcome anymore? Or did Denoon tell someone else to summon her? Has he gotten better? Is he better? Should she go back? Should she go back?
After 5 or 6 pages of her obsessive worrying backs and forths … the book ends with these two simple lines:
Je viens.
Why not?
I have been haunted by this. HAUNTED. For YEARS. [Remember: I wrote this piece in 2003!! He had not published ANYTHING ELSE at that date!] Then what? Then what? It has been so long since Mating came out. I have tried to reconcile myself to the fact that I need to, a la Rilke, “live the questions”.
The fact that the book ends mysteriously, that it could go either way, that you do not know the ending – you do not know if she and Denoon reconcile – or what happens when she goes back – the fact that this is left unresolved confirms for me one of the essential tenets of life: You just never know what will happen. Things can always go either way. Also: Things never really end. Not really. They transform, they morph. Love never dies. Ever. I’m not an “I love you I love you – oh you don’t love me back anymore? Then I hate you I hate you” kind of girl. Sometimes I wish I were. It might be easier if love turned readily to hate, but for me, it does not. So alongside my relatively quiet life now are the vibrant love affairs of my past. They make me who I am today. They do not go away, or submerge into the past for good. They are still very much with me, late and soon.
And last week, for some reason, for no reason at all, I became obsessed again by the up-in-the-air ending of Mating. What does it signify? What is the message? What should I get from it?? It seems essential that I answer this for myself.
Also on a plainly literal level: What happened when she returned to Africa? Are they together now out on that alternate plane for fictional characters? I always liked to imagine that they were. It made me happy to imagine so. It made me happy to fantasize that on that alternate plane, all turned out well. Eventually.
It’s a sort of “Somewhere over the rainbow” sentiment. Things may be lonely here on this plane, but somewhere — even if it’s just for characters in a book — things might work out. And this alone gives me reason to hope. Things just might work out — because the ending of Mating doesn’t make it clear whether they do or no.
On a personal note: I used to have these old crazy fantasies about “my Nelson Denoon”, fantasies which felt more like getting a glimpse of a never-before-seen alternate path. I comforted myself, after it was all over, by imagining that on that other plane, down that other path, things might have worked out. Maybe down that other path, he and I were sitting on that front stoop I saw in my fantasy – with music floating out the screened window – coffee cups beside us, a crisp fall air … reading and not talking. But together. Together forever. I had mistaken a glimpse of an alternate reality for a glimpse of what was going to happen.
I became convinced that this was not the first time around for me and “my Nelson Denoon”. I would obsess about it, even though I’m not a believer in reincarnation. It didn’t matter. Something else was going on here … it defied explanation … and I worried it to death. “Were we married in another life? Or … with each successive lifetime, are we coming closer to one another? It just so happens that I am stuck in the lifetime where it doesn’t work out…” I was blithering like this once to my patient friend Kate. She listened. And then she said, “I bet that your Celtic tribe probably slaughtered his Celtic tribe.”
All of this came up to the foreground again, in the last week, (it all began dovetailing), Mating was on my mind, and I thought, impulsively: “I should just write to Norman Rush and ask him what he’s up to … if he’s working on anything …” He hasn’t published anything else since Mating, so — I wondered — is he chugging away at a sequel? Is he dead? I needed to know desperately.
I composed the letter in my mind. “Mr. Rush — are you just going to leave me hanging with the end of Mating? Do you know how important it is, how essential it is in terms of my understanding of how the world works, that I know what happened with the two of them? Will I ever know the outcome?”
I have written to authors befor (and some – like Madeleine L’Engle – have even responded!), so it wasn’t too far-fetched.
Then, a couple of days ago, I stopped off at a computer place to check my email. While there, I visited my SiteMeter for this blog, and I saw that someone had gotten to me by typing “Norman Rush” into Google. Google led this person to my blog – where I had written a piece on Rush. And this piqued my interest. Somebody else is looking for Norman Rush right now? Why? Is something going on? Has he published again?
So I Googled the man.
The first thing that came up was a Village Voice article dated May, 2003. I opened it, and lo and freakin’ behold, it was a review of his new book. The man has a new book out. Mortals.
I hope I have conveyed how important this is to me. But I am having a hard time finding the words.
It would be like hearing that JD Salinger had suddenly come out of hiding and published a new novel. While Salinger is still alive, there is still hope that he may write again. He just might. And the book might be crap, but that wouldn’t matter. At least not at first. It would be a miracle. To hear from that writer again.
So Rush has a new huge novel out. And again, it takes place in Botswana.
Mortals
And here’s the thing: (WARNING: SPOILER ALERT)
I raced through the book review excitedly and could not believe my eyes: Nelson and “she” show up in this new book – albeit peripherally. They have a guest spot, if you will. My heart pounded. These are my friends. And I have not heard from my friends in over 10 years. And, oh so casually, Village Voice reviewer states: “We learn that they have married.”
I didn’t read the rest of the review, I signed out immediately, paid my bill, and hustled my ass down to Barnes & Noble to find the book, which had been published THAT WEEK.
(Okay, let’s just take a moment to reflect on how weird that is. Out of nowhere, Norman Rush comes to my mind, and I randomly contemplate writing to him, pestering him to write a sequel, and dammitall if he doesn’t have a new book published on almost that same exact day.)
And there it was. A huge book. Hardcover. With a map of Botswana inside. I got a chill of excitement. I felt voracious. Almost sick to my stomach, actually. I wanted to download the entire book into my brain immediately. I glanced through and saw that there was a chapter called “The Denoons”, and I had to restrain myself. Prolong the anticipation, more pleasure that way.
And as I was walking down the street, with my booty in my bag, I suddenly got weirdly emotional.
It was as though I had heard that real friends of mine had finally gotten married after much strife.
It’s a bit embarrassing to admit, but I was almost in tears, truth be told.
There have been times in the past couple of years when life has been the cliched howling wilderness. “My Nelson Denoon” remains a kind of monument, a sort of goal. I have tried to knock him off that pedestal, but I have finally accepted the fact that he deserves to be up there. He earned his spot. My heart is open to others, but he’s there, regardless. Whether I am with him or not.
When things did not come to fruition between us, my baffled thought was: If that didn’t work out, that which seemed so damn right, then what the hell will work out? For quite a long time, my answer to that question was: Nothing. Nothing.
But then … here … years later … walking down the street, knowing that she and Nelson got married — after all that —
I suddenly felt an upsurge of hope. Not for me and “my Nelson Denoon”, because that is no longer possible. But what I mean is: hope in general.
A word on hope:
Hope for me, now, now always goes hand in hand with a bittersweet and rather vague pain. Hope never comes by itself anymore, the way it used to when I was a little kid, or a teenager. I suppose that’s indicative of age and experience. It seems so to me anyway. That’s life. I am not saying this exactly as I wanted to. Basically: Hope no longer comes alone.
The sadness and hope I felt, walking down the street, wasn’t about Nelson and the narrator of Mating being married… at least, not only about them. The sadness and hope was also from how I see life now. In terms of mating. I feel like I had my run and it was a good run. I had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs. But all that has stopped now.
So I got overwhelmed by this weird sense of sad hope — the heart bounding to painful life again – a feeling that STILL, after all THAT, “things” might “work out”. For me, in my life. It’s awful when one becomes afraid to feel hope anymore, protecting oneself against the inevitable disappointment.
I am not a young girl of 22, with a couple of disappointments in my past. I’m older now, and I’ve been through a lot. Not all bad. Of course not all bad. Like I said: a lot of laughs. Much fun. But now, I just find it easier not to hope … at least in that arena … and focus on other things. My work. My ambition, my plans.
But … but ….
They got married.
They got married.
What does that mean? For me?
Perhaps a breakthrough is approaching. A breakthrough in how I interpret all of this. And the appearance of Norman Rush’s Mortals is the harbinger of something good. Or, something different. Something exciting, unforeseen, challenging. That’s what I was feeling as I walked down the street, too. I’m scared of it … and yet. Perhaps it is time. I don’t know. Even as I write that, the logical side of my brain, the side that has all the experience, that knows the let-downs, etc., says: “Yes, but you have felt this before. You have felt this so strongly before. And you were never right.”
But maybe … maybe … Maybe this is it.
There is SOMETHING weird about how all of this has come about, the chain of events:
My relationship with the book Mating
Mating being wrapped up with “my Nelson Denoon”
How I held onto this weird strange hope that things worked out well, at least for them
How I have always, since I read the book for the first time, felt like I was waiting for the sequel: “Je viens. Why not?” BUT THEN WHAT?????
Sitting down over the last couple of weeks, for no apparent reason, to study the book again
Feeling this urge to write to Norman Rush
And then – the next day – someone arrives at my blog, through Googling Norman Rush …during the very week I was obsessing about Rush, and where he was, and whether or not he was writing something else
Then finding out that Rush has written a new book … published last week … in which we discover the Denoons have married
And so:
Things are not what they seem.
Back to the old painful belief: You never ever know what will happen. You can never tell what the future will hold. Your predictions will all be wrong.
I have tentatively and slowly begun Mortals, forcing myself not to browse ahead, forcing myself not to look for references to the Denoons. I want to savor every word.
I have waited for this day for so long.
