Module 1: "Solarium" (from Black Swan Green) by David Mitchell

This solarium didn't have any scientific apparatus in it, though its skylights were big enough for telescopes.

Perhaps the vicar was putting his quill in his inkpot, huffing, “Gracious, three o'clock already?”

"This”—Madame Crommelynck took such a mighty drag on her cigarette I could see it shrink—"should be no mystery to an agile brain. I deliver your poems to the real vicar in his real vicarage. An ugly bungalow near Hanley Castle. I do not charge you for this service. Is gratis. Is a fine exercise for my not-agile bones. But in payment, I read your poems first.”

“You imagine blank verse is a liberation, but no. Discard rhyme, you discard a parachute....Sentimentality you mistake for emotion....You love words, yes”—a pride bubble swelled up in me—“but your words are still the master of you, you are not yet master of them...”

“T. S. Eliot expresses it so—the poem is a raid on the inarticulate. I, Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, agree with him. Poems who are not written yet, or not written ever, exists here. The realm of the inarticulate..."

“We say, we say. Be careful of say. Words say, ‘You have labeled this abstract, this concept, therefore you have captured it.’ Or not lie, but are maladroit..."

“No. That title is hazardous. But I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and”—she uttered the word like a pantomime witch—"'elope'! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as...épouvantail, a—how you say the man in a field who frights birds?”

“No. That title is hazardous. But I had intimacy with poets when I was young. Robert Graves wrote a poem of me. Not his best. William Carlos Williams asked me to abandon my husband and”—she uttered the word like a pantomime witch—"'elope'! Very romantic, but I had a pragmatic head and he was destitute as...épouvantail, a—how you say the man in a field who frights birds?”

"...My native tongue is Flemish. So you hear, English is not an adroit tongue for me, too many -lesses and -lessnesses. You think I am French?”

The destiny of discreet neighbors is to be confused with the noisy ones next door.

They patronize, they flatter, maybe they wish to comfort themselves.

In the gaudy frame a shivery woman sprawled in a punt on a clogged pond.

Who foundationed European literature if not the ancient Greeks? Not Eliot's coterie of thiefs of graves, I assure you!

“Then your logic is eluding me.”

“You are being quintessentially truthful.”

“Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her ‘prat’ and you will justly earn derision...."

“Absolutely, if you compose derivative verses of cupids and cliché, Miss Madden will remain with her ‘prat’ and you will justly earn derision...."

“Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees; even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television. Despicable machine. Television was here in my solarium. When I arrived. I throwed it in the cellar. It was watching me. A poet throws all but truth in the cellar. Jason. There is a matter?”

“Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees; even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television. Despicable machine. Television was here in my solarium. When I arrived. I throwed it in the cellar. It was watching me. A poet throws all but truth in the cellar. Jason. There is a matter?”

“Truth is everywhere, like seeds of trees; even deceits contain elements of truth. But the eye is clouded by the quotidian, by prejudice, by worryings, scandal, predation, passion, ennui, and, worst, television. Despicable machine. Television was here in my solarium. When I arrived. I throwed it in the cellar. It was watching me. A poet throws all but truth in the cellar. Jason. There is a matter?”

“One week before, we agreed ‘What is beauty?' is a question unanswerable, yes? So today, a greater mystery. If an art is true, if an art is free of falsenesses, it is, a priori, beautiful.”

“Of course I am right. If ‘Jason Taylor’ was the name here, and not ‘Eliot Bolivar Ph.D., O.B.E., R.I.P., B.B.C.’”—she biffed the page with “Hangman” on it—“the truth will make the greatest mortification with the hairy barbarians of Black Swan Green, yes?”

Poets survive in gulags, in detention blocks, in torture chambers.

“The sextet of Robert Frobisher. He was an amanuensis for my father, when my father was too old, too blind, too weak to hold a pen.”

“Oh? And how does this authority venerate my father?”

“A majestic encomium.”

“My father praised Robert without respite! So my behavior was disgracious. But such reverences, such empathies that existed between them, they are very combustible. Friendship is a calmer thing. Robert left Zedelgem in winter.”

“I abhor that girl! I abhorred her all my life and I do not know how to stop to abhor her.”

I'm not sure what “sophistry” means so I kept schtum.

“Robert's sextet is now impossible to buy. You encounter his music only by serendipity in vicarages in July afternoons. This is your one chance in your life. You can work this gramophone?”

“'Fantasy'? Pffft! Listen to Ronald Reagan's homilies! 'Horror'? What of Vietnam, Afghanistan, South Africa? Idi Amin, Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot? Is not enough horror? I mean, who are your masters? Chekhov?”

“So. Translate the first chapter of Alain-Fournier from French to English, or do not return next Saturday. The author needs no parochial schoolchildren to disfigure his truth, but I need you to proof you do not waste my time. Go.”

“The Crommelyncks have been extradited!”

“The home secretary wouldn't let Interpol whisk them away if he wasn't jolly well sure of his facts, would he? But it's an ill wind, I always say. Now we can use the lawn for our fête, after all.”

“I made a mistake,” I said, sheepishly.