Yet Unquestionable E-Book

Angel Rupert

• Herausgeber: Bentockiz
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

But soon life intruded into that waking dream. She was bored with her job and looking into other options within the university. The course with the best professor in that period had been cancelled and replaced by one taught by the worst teacher not only for the period but in the whole department. Few things could’ve made it worthwhile, but she was one of those few.

Leseprobe

Title Page

Yet Unquestionable

Without Consolation

Angel Rupert

Yet Unquestionable / 1st of series: Without Consolation / By Angel Rupert

Published 2023 by Bentockiz

e-book Imprint: Uniochlors

e-book Registration: Stockholm, Sweden

e-book ISBN: 9789198847109

e-book editing: Athens, Greece

Cover Images created via AI art generators

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Introduction

Through books we come into contact with everything important that has happened in the past, analyzing also current events and putting our thoughts together to predict the future. The book is a window to the world, acquiring valuable knowledge and sparking our vivid imagination. It is a means of entertainment and is generally seen as a best friend, or as a slave that carries together all valuable information for us. The book is a friend who stays together without demands, a friend you call upon at every moment and abandon when you want.

It accompanies us in the hours of boredom and loneliness, while at the same time it entertains us. In general, a book does not ask anything from us, while it waits patiently on a dusty shelf to give us its information, to get us out of dead ends and to travel us to magical worlds.

This may be the travel mission of our books. Abstract narration, weird or unconscious thoughts difficult to be understood, but always genuine and full of life experiences, these are stories of life that can’t be overlooked easily.

This may be the start of something amazing.

Chapter One

Barton not only employed Zach and fed him a majority of his meals (lunch every day he worked over there, snacks over drinks after work or on social occasions, and frequent dinners—sometimes including Allison, sometimes not—at his house or a nearby pizza parlor nicknamed “Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls” after a porn movie showing at a local drive-in or a barbecue joint down the road), he also introduced him to the larger world of art. Zach was fairly familiar with fiction and literature from his reading in Boston and at Yale. But he knew little about poetry and virtually nothing about the non-literary arts—painting and sculpture and classical music. Barton’s house was a virtual museum, with paintings of various genres and periods covering all the walls and stacked in corners and on chairs awaiting display, and many sizes and types of sculpture on the floor, tables and pedestals. He also had an extensive collection of vinyl records and tapes and made a point of playing the music of the great classical composers—Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Handel—whenever Zach was inside the house. Zach’s Lutheran background made him especially susceptible to the majestic chorales of Bach and Handel, but he also found himself utterly transfixed by a new (to him) Italian composer named Claudio Monteverdi. His haunting yet simultaneously serene and uplifting choral vespers uncovered a pietistic place in Zach’s soul he didn’t know existed, with the enrapturing Vespro della beata Vergine dissolving him in tears of joy the first time he heard it (sitting alone in Barton’s living room while Barton was pouring the requisite afternoon drinks in the kitchen) and was a refrain ever playing in his head through the months to follow.

And then there was poetry. Through high school and college, Zach had caught fleeting glimpses of the power and mystery of poetry. Verses from Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” and Eliot’s “Prufrock” would descend at the oddest moments—“Black out; Heaven blazing into the head” at the sight of a dog trailing a leash struck by a car on Comm. Ave. (was that verse for him, the dog, or its wailing owner on the sidewalk?) or “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas” sitting on a barstool at last call at a strip club. But like most of his generation raised on the reverberations and visceral gratifications of rock and roll, poetry by and large seemed to him archaic and obtuse, an obsolete language couched in dense and impenetrable metaphor and allusion.

Until some of those same verses, offered with feeling and awe in Barton’s resonant baritone, sprung to life before his eyes and within his ears, not like “Lazarus come from the dead” (“Prufrock,” again), swaddled and encumbered in grave cloths, but like bounding gazelles full of life and vivid motion and unpredictable leaps of meaning and sense. With Zach’s attentive audience and full and reckless trust, Barton dusted off his sizable repertoire of memorized lines and shared them as occasion called and opportunity arose. He summoned forth and laid bare Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Cowper, Wordsworth and Keats and Tennyson and Poe, Dickinson and Kipling and Robinson and Yeats, Eliot and Frost and Auden and Lowell. And Zach, with an uncanny and previously unknown ear for recitation, memorized the shorter pieces on the spot and took the longer ones home in borrowed cherished volumes for rehearsal. With this permission and new-found passion (O.K.—obsession) Zach dusted off his Norton Anthology of Poetry from his Yale days and read it from cover to cover, marking the poems and lines that seemed to him the most powerful and thrilling, and reciting them to Barton at the earliest opportunity—even a few times calling him late at night to share his latest find over the phone. In this way, he stumbled on a poem by Keats that became for them both—in its romantic longing and its intimation of mortality and loss—the signature, and oft recited by one or the other or both simultaneously, poem for this period—their summer cut out of time, their romance held forth and grasped.

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou wouldst wish thy own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

“It seems like you’re reaching too far outside yourself,” Barton said with slow deliberation.

For some reason this afternoon he’d chosen to sit in the chair backing onto the picture window and bright summer woods beyond, the chair where Zach usually sat if alone, leaving Zach to sit on the loveseat. From that position, Barton’s face and upper body were backlit by the leaf-filtered but still glaring sunlight pressing through the glass, leaving Barton in ponderous shadow and, Zach presumed, him in the full exposure of the day’s diffuse light.

It was a Tuesday in mid-August and a day off from yard work for Zach. About a week earlier he’d spent a whole day in a thicket full of chiggers and discovered on waking the next day the uniquely southern experience of the chigger bite—in his case, more than two dozen bites, huge welts around his ankles, behind his knees, and all up in his crotch, welts that drove him to distraction with their inflammation and itchiness. His body had reacted so violently to this unfamiliar pathogen that he’d spent two days in bed, doped up with antihistamine to fight the swelling. (It was the chemical secreted by the tiny insect, not the insect, that caused the reaction—contrary to local lore that claimed the insect burrowed into the skin and took up residence there, laying eggs and hatching whole families of chiggerettes to feed off and ravage your helpless epidermis.) Zach had recovered from the worst of his allergic reaction but was still a little tired and plenty itchy, his legs plastered with calamine lotion below his cotton shorts (and above them too, though he didn’t mention that to Barton).

In anticipation of classes starting in a few weeks, Barton had asked Zach for some ideas for his independent study project on a work of long fiction. (Barton was officially on sabbatical this fall, as he worked to complete his latest novel; but he’d agreed to oversee Zach’s independent study in writing, a course he was taking in addition to four regular classes in literature and history.) Zach had submitted three ideas along with sample scenes for each. And Barton had invited him to the house to talk over the proposals.

Zach fixed his steady gaze on the backlit Barton. “The characters or the themes?” Two of the proposals were vaguely autobiographical—a young man trying to find his way to adulthood through perilous struggle: with nature in one case, another man in the other. The third idea was for an idyll of farm life in a simpler era.

“The place,” Barton replied. “I can see you and what you care about in all these topics. And that’s good—young writers, old ones too for that matter, need to stay close to home, close to what they know. But there’s the problem with these ideas—they take a familiar protagonist and put him in unfamiliar territory. He won’t know where home is, or what it is.”