"Robert McCammon - Boy's Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCammon Robert R)

with grins, scabbed knees, and noise.
In glass I see an older man,
but this book’s for the boys.




I WANT TO TELL YOU SOME IMPORTANT THINGS BEFORE WE START our journey.
I lived through it all. That’s one problem about relating events in first
person. The reader knows the narrator didn’t get killed. So whatever might
happen to me—whatever did happen to me—you can be sure I lived through it all,
though I might be a little better or worse for the experience, and you can
make up your own mind which.
There might be some places where you’ll say, “Hey, how come he knows this
event right here happened or this person said or did this or that if he wasn’t
even there?” The answer to that question is that I found out enough later on
to fill in the blanks, or in some cases I made up what happened, or in other
cases I figured it ought to have happened that way even if it didn’t.
I was born in July of 1952. I am approaching my fortieth birthday. Gosh,
that’s some number, isn’t it? I am no longer, as my reviews used to say, a
“promising young talent.” I am what I am. I have been writing since I was in
grammar school, and thinking up stories long before I understood exactly what
it was I was doing. I have been a published writer since 1978. Or is it
“author”? Paperback writer, as the Beatles said. Hardback author? One thing’s
for sure: I certainly have developed a hard back. I have suffered kicks and
smiled at kindnesses just like any other brother or sister on our spinning
home. I have been blessed, to be able to create characters and worlds out of
whole cloth. Writer? Author?
How about storyteller?
I wanted to set my memories down on paper, where I can hold them. You
know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic
town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that
web of magic, connected by the silver filaments of chance and circumstance.
But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic
lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present, and into
the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my
opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest
fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the
clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic
educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed
out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be
responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you
know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid
of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and
sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.
After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back.
You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When
people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool
of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of
logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little