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Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction: <\/p>\nDaily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction: <\/p>\n
Frankenstein<\/a> Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley<\/a>, her husband Percy Shelley<\/a>, Lord Byron<\/a>, and Lord Byron’s physician Dr. John Polidori <\/a>sat around one rainy summer night in 1816- they were neighbors in Switzerland – and after a series of rainy days when they were housebound – Byron (who was working on Childe Harold<\/i> at the time) came up with a suggestion for a way to amuse themselves as a group. Each person was to write a ghost story (there was an old volume of ghost stories in one of their vacation homes – and that was the inspiration for this little party game. Yeah, you know, a party game with two of the most influential poets of their day and a woman who was about to write a classic novel. At the age of nineteen years old. Mm-hm. That was some party game.)<\/p>\n Here is Mary Shelley describing this. It is a perfect and personal description of the artistic process. Anyone who has ever tried to create something … or wanted to create something and just felt they needed to have an idea<\/i> … will recognize themselves in Mary Shelley’s words.<\/p>\n Watch how she works it out. Lets her subconscious lead her. She doesn’t ask too many questions. She gets her idea, and she GOES. (Rather akin to Dr. Frankenstein’s own journey with his monster. There are so many levels here.)<\/p>\n But I just love that she has given us such a detailed essay about how she wrote this book. Goosebumps.<\/p>\n “We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron, and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole – what to see I forget: something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished their uncongenial task.<\/p>\n I busied myself to think of a story<\/i> – a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered – vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull. Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. “Have you thought of a story?” I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.<\/p>\n Everything must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindus give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.<\/p>\n Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the doctor really did or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.<\/p>\n Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Craetor of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade, that this thing which had received such imperfect animation would subside into dead matter, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.<\/p>\n I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still: the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story – my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! Oh! If I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frighttened that night!<\/p>\n Swiftly as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story<\/i>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n So exciting! And so now WE, the reader, have a “spectre” to “haunt our midnight pillow”. I re-read Frankenstein<\/i> a year or so ago, it had been a long time since I read it – maybe 20 years … and so I was amazed to discover, yet again, the philosophy that is in the book (very prescient stuff, I think – in terms of technology and man vs. nature – eternal questions) – The writing, at times, is almost over-the-top romantic:<\/p>\n The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; the icy wall of the glaceir overhung me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silence working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands. these sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation that I was capable of receiving. They elevated me from all littleness of feeling, and although they did not remove my grief, they subdued and tranquillized it. In some degree, also, they diverted my mind from the thoughts over which it had brooded for the last month. I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the unstained snowy mountaintop, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods, and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds – they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.<\/p>\n Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-inspiriting fled with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought. the rain was pouring in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of the mountains, so that I even saw not the faces of those mighty friends. Still I would penetrate their misty veil and seek in them their cloudy retreats. What were rain and storm to me? My mule was brought to the door, and I resolved to ascend to the summit of Montanvert. I remembered the effect that the view of the tremendous and ever-moving glacier had produced upon my mind when I first saw it. It had then filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul and allowed it to soar from the obscure world to light and joy. The sight of the awful and the majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0486282112\")