An Imaginary Life - Closing

He is walking on the water's light. And as I watch, he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance, above the earth, above the water, on air.

It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six.

I am there.

An Imaginary Life - pg. 136

I have become braver in my old age, ready at last for all the changes we must undergo, as painfully we allow our limbs to burst into a new form, let the crust of our flesh split and the tree break through, or the moth or bird abandon us for air. What else is death but the refusal any longer to grow and suffer for change?

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.

An Imaginary Life - Opening

IT is the desolateness of this place that day after day fills my mind with its perspectives. A line of cliffs, oblique against the sky, and the sea leaden beyond. To the west and south, mountains, heaped under cloud. To the north, beyond the marshy river mouth, empty grasslands, rolling level to the pole.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 1996

Copyright 1978 by David Malouf

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by George Braziller, Inc., New York, in 1978.

Printed in the United States of America