unearths some literary gems.
***
I was taken aback, and may be said to have stayed aback ever since.
***
Tomorrow, ten times the size of last Tuesday, is suddenly rich with promise.
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[New York City is] a comic strip painted on vellum and bound in gold.
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[The routine of preliminary play rehearsals] for the author is rather like conducting a party of tourists across fields of glue.
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[The secret of the stereoscope] is that having attained at last the third dimension, it begins to remind us of the fourth dimension, that of Time.
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[A dream is] a bonus after dark, another slice of life cut differently....Only a dream! Why only?
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There is to me a curious pleasure...in coming upon a real street scene that looks like a good stage set. [I am totally with him on this!]
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[The sound of an orchestra tuning up is] a chaos...but it is a chaos caught at the supreme moment, immediately before Creation. Everything of order and beauty shortly to be revealed is already there in it. Moreover, it never fails us, unlike some of the compositions that will follow it.
***
I must admit that with me the delight comes from receiving the free pass and not from actually making use of it....Ironically enough, once I have been given a free pass I rarely find any opportunity to use it.
***
[His younger self's journal notes] are portentous, each note weighing at least fifty-six pounds.
***
This kind of morning…. has a unique trick of lifting me out of time; I seem to be moving along a fifth dimension and to have a four-dimensional outlook. Or put it more sensibly like this. These mornings link up directly and vividly with similar mornings in my past, so that I am aware of myself as I was then.
***
[More snippets attached.]
[Bonus: A (presumably) nonexistent dull book called Life and Times of Lord Dreary. N.B. When transcribing that title just now, I initially left out "and Times." I'm glad I caught the error, because I genuinely feel the complete title is so much better than my inadvertently abridged version. The boring lord's life and times! (my emphasis).]
[Also: One of Priestley's little essays is a tribute to the everything-intentionally-goes-wrong act of Frank Van Hoven. I wasn't aware of this precursor to Tommy Cooper et al., but I assume you know all about him. The Internet tells me, correctly or otherwise, that FVH's slogan was "The Man Who Made Ice Famous." Priestley refers to a genre of FVH trick "as labyrinthine and regressive as a Kafka novel, a trick never to be completed in this world," and describes Van Hoven's unsuccessful struggle with all those uncooperative "things."]
