"Gene Wolfe - Endangered Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

glimpses an ocean in "The Sister's Account."

Therefore, let me describe the reader for whom I wrote
all these stories. I wrote them for you. Not for some professor
or for myself, and certainly not for the various editors who
bought them, frequently very reluctantly, after they had been
rejected by several others. You see, I am not an academic
writing to be criticized. (Academics think the criticism the
most important part of the whole process, in which they are
wholly wrong.) Nor am I one of those self-indulgent people
who write in order to admire their own cleverness at a later
date; I do, occasionally, admire myself; but I am always made
sorry for it afterward. (A few days ago I heard a young writer
say, "I've had fun, and this isn't it." He expressed my feeling
exactly.) Nor am I what is called a commercial writer, one
who truckles to appease editors in the hope of making a great
deal of money. There are easier ways to do that.
This is simple truth: Tonight you and I, with billions of
others, are sitting around the fire we call "the sun," telling
stories; and from time to time it has been my turn to enter-
tain. I have occasionally remembered that though you are
not a child, there is a child alive in you still, for those in whom
the child is dead will not hear stories. Thus I wrote "War
Beneath the Tree," and certain others. Knowing, as you do,
what it is to love and to lose love, you may appreciate "A
Cabin on the Coast." Because you have sometimes pitied
others, I have told you "Our Neighbour by David Copper-
field," and because others have sometimes pitied you, "The
Headless Man." We have sought and not found, you and I
-thus, "The Map." Sought and found, and thus "The De-
tective of Dreams."

You are both a woman, amused by men, and a man, en-
thralled by women. You realize that it is only in our own time
that life has become easy enough to permit a handful of us
to abrogate our ancient alliance-nearly every story here will
reflect that, I think. Others depend upon you, the steady one,
and you depend upon others. Your lively imagination is gov-
erned by reason; you find it difficult to make friends, though
you are a good friend to those you have made. At certain
times you have feared that you are insane, at others that you
are the only sane person in the world. You are patient, and
yet eager.

Most important to me, you will be my willing partner in
the making of all these stories-for no two readers have ever
heard exactly the same story, and the real story is a thing
that grows between the teller and the listener. If I have been
wrong about you, you are welcome to tell me so the next time
we meet.