"Barry Longyear - Dark Corners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

didn’t really want to go back to sleep. I got up, put on a sweatshirt, made some neutered coffee, and
stumbled upstairs to my office to write it out.

What was my friend the unconscious trying to tell me? I began writing down the dream, the fleeting
thoughts that were racing back to their hiding places in my mind were rounded up and dragged to the
paper, and the story that became “Chimaera” was begun. It was through writing that story that I managed
to crack the code and figure out what my dream was trying to tell me. It was this:

There was something lurking in a dark corner of my mind, a memory, a number of memories, that I had
spent a lifetime not seeing because they did not fit into the reality in which I wanted to live. But the
memories were coming, and no matter how hard I tried to deny them, forget them, or disguise them, they
would be heard at last.

And heard they were. Years later their echoes remain. After much work they are becoming a part of me,
but through that work I discovered that the dark corner of my mind which I finally illuminated was only
one of thousands. Each dark corner calls for its own light, and this function is what is served by many of
my stories.

The corners I have explored have shown me laughter, grief, shame, pain, courage, cowardice, fear, and
thousands of different views of myself, others, and this universe in which we live and do our hopeless best
to keep up with the changes. It seems as though we spend our childhoods constructing mental hiding
places for ourselves and for the things we refuse to acknowledge, and then spend the rest of our lives
either being controlled by these dark corners or fighting like the devil to take back our power from them.
From where do these dark corners come? It comes from a process that is as natural as time.

There was once a first grader who was having a birthday party, and all of his classmates were invited to
the party at his home — all but one. Perhaps an invitation got misplaced, perhaps his name was left out
because of a momentary lapse of memory, perhaps he was just not wanted. Whatever the reason, the
boy who was not invited chose not to see that he was not invited.

At the end of the school day, as his excited classmates began climbing on the chartered bus to where the
party would be held, the uninvited boy could not say to the others that he couldn’t go because he wasn’t
invited. He couldn’t allow them to believe that. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that. He followed the
others onto the bus and went to the party. There he told his classmates, the birthday boy, and himself that
he was invited so convincingly that everyone believed him, including himself. There were, presents, party
favors, cake, ice cream, music, a movie, and pretty lights. Everyone was laughing and playing games, and
he laughed and played with the others. He had never before had such a wonderful time.

There was much amusement, though, when the uninvited boy’s mother finally tracked him down and the
truth came out. He wasn’t invited to the party, no arrangements had been made, and the silly boy just
followed everyone else onto the bus. She had been frantic when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be
at the appointed time. The birthday boy’s mother laughed, the classmates laughed, the uninvited boy’s
mother laughed, and the uninvited boy laughed with them.

That is how dark corners come into being. Mind shadows aren’t possible in the absence of some kind of
injury and the denial of that injury. And for every mind shadow that comes into being, one or more
persons pay. The uninvited boy could not bear the pain of being left out. Hence, he adjusted his view of
reality until hewas invited. This adjustment cast a shadow, however, a shadow that kept him from seeing
and therefore feeling, the rejection, the pain, and the humiliation. When he was caught in his reality lie and
everyone, including his mother, was making fun of him, he adjusted reality again, made fun of himself,