The Boy

Who Played

With

Shadows

​by

Quentin S. Crisp

Before the Beginning, a Prayer

How do we measure what is real, that is, the degree of its reality? Can it be quantified?

   Certainly, pure wish-fulfilment seems a form of denial, and therefore a mistake. But is there not an opposite form of denial holding sway in the world at present whereby the more poisonous a thing is to humanity (in both senses of the word), the truer it is taken to be? C.S. Lewis said there is fear-fulfilment as well as wish-fulfilment.

  The Pines, Woodlands: If I live long enough, and if human readers remain, I dare say I shall write more about this house and the life I remember living there. Turn the corner of the stair, gain the landing, enter a door to the right. Here is the room where my brother and I would play a game we invented called ‘Jumping Germs’. I am not sure the game had a formula, but we both understood it. Jumping on the bed together, flapping bits of foam in our hands, we seemed regularly to escape the bonds of gravity. Now I think of my younger self bouncing especially high and, at the peak of my jump, looking through an attic window into a starry night—cartoon stars of white against a deep Chagall blue. 

   The magic of childhood, denied by so many, does not, to me, indicate outward circumstances, but that there was a time when the world had not succeeded in driving a wedge between me and my starry heart. What is done to the individual is done to the species. When people dream now, they dream of things that will be the end of the very beings who dream. Sometimes this is called transhumanism, sometimes antinatalism.

   If I place two pictures next to each other—one of myself, a jumping germ against a starry sky, and one of humanity feeding itself to a Moloch machine out of venomous spite—I know which seems more real to me, but I doubt it is the one that most humans now choose. If you could choose exactly who you were, who would you be?

   I hope I can slip away before I am swept along with the insanity of progress; slip away and find a soft, starry chamber full of Walpole’s gloomth, a mindwarp pavilion for dwarfmen and Bewlay Brothers, a Night Kitchen, a sad, beautiful sanctuary for Persis, the lost doll.

The Boy Who Played with Shadows is Vol. VII in the L'Homme Recent series. 

A splendidly written, outstanding memoir from Quentin Crisp, covering everything from Lovecraft to childhood, from Maurice Sendak to Woody Allen and Thomas Ligotti and Fantastic Literature, from tiger make-up faces to the Supernatural Rubin Vase, from E.M. Cioran to Nothingness and Gooligars. A rich, evocative, melancholic and warm study of an Author's Starry Heart.

The book, an hardcover edition containing two large fold-out pages, plenty of artwork and photography, is scheduled to be published in June, 2015.

A copy is 55 Euro, including shipping with a tracking number.

For orders, inquires, questions and a PDF Preview of the book send me a message at exoccidente@gmail.com