Unfaded Pleasure

Cover by Bruce Pennington, 1974.

Elsewhere on the vast filthy Web, someone asked for opinions about THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND, by William Hope Hodgson. I replied:

It was one of the many books that impressed me during my 'teen years, but which I now find clumsy to the point of pain. Was I wrong to admire it, way back when? No. Was I right to move on? Yes. Depending on who we are, on what we need to learn and to do, certain books are best for certain stages of our lives. Any work of prose or verse that can carry us through many stages is one to be loved, but works that only speak to us during one stage are not necessarily bad; they are stepping stones that we use and then pass by.

I will not deny the stories I loved when I was eleven years old; for me, at the time, they were great. That I find them unreadable now says more about me than it does about them.

Yet even after so many decades, I can still read, with unfaded pleasure, stories by H. G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, and Clark Ashton Smith -- not because I read them now with an eleven-year-old's eyes and heart, not because of any nostalgia, but because the stories have grown as I have grown, in the same directions, and together.