But, when he did write, it was usually because something had temporarily broken up his misery — not to the extent of producing actual happiness but enough to permit him to contemplate the dreadful facts of existence in a creative light.
If their characters are pricked by a helpless urge to travel — down a rabbit hole, to sea in a sieve, second star to the right and straight on till morning — it is because there is always something, a drab existence or a dreadful past, that begs to be fled.
To know what happens in advance would be to spoil not just a narrative surprise in a heart-thumping tale, but the entire apparatus Vann has constructed to wrench out the dreadful and meaningless facts of existence, to master them, and, in a violent act of fictional transmogrification, to reconfigure them as something not less, but more real.
If their characters are pricked by a helpless urge to travel down a rabbit hole, to sea in a sieve, second star to the right and straight on till morning—it is because there is always something, a drab existence or a dreadful past, that begs to be fled.
In short, the problem is that you cannot harm a non-existent person by bringing it into existence, unless the person's life is so dreadful that nonexistence is preferable.
That so much information keeps coming out is proof, they say, of a dreadful decline in journalistic standards and of the existence of "a vast right-wing conspiracy".
"Of course, delivering a stillborn baby naturally is dreadful, but it can help to cement a child's existence for a mother and father," she says.
I'm hardly naïve about the existence of police abuse, whether in New York (where Mr. Kelly has had some dreadful lapses) or elsewhere.
The Devil Rays' dreadful start to their fifth season continues a pattern they have followed through their brief existence.
