An Imaginary Life - pg. 58

Listening to the old man now, telling his stories in our little yard, I know what the different voices siginify: they are the north wind, they are wolves, they are a shinbone, a severed head, they are the bottom of the sea. The old man's stories are fabulous beyond anything I have retold from the Greeks; but savage, a form of extravagant play that eplains nothing, but speaks straight out of the nightmare landscape of this place and my dream journeys across it. Our civilized fables that account so elegantly for what we see and know seem feeble beside these elaborate and absurd jokes the old man mutters over. They are like winter here. They fill the world. They make the head buzz, they numb the blood. They seem absolutely true and yet they explain nothing.