house the owner of the books had inherited from his father, who had been a wealthy bookmaker. The side of the room opposite the cabinets mentioned consisted mostly of tall windows overlooking fish ponds set among beds of ferns. The strangeness of the image-sky, so the owner of the book mentioned was explaining to the man beside him, consisted in its seeming to be lit not by a single source of image-light but by several such sources or by its being uniformly suffused with an image-light from no discoverable image-source. How else, so the owner of the book argued â how else to explain the appearance beneath one after another opening in the image-clouds of one after another zone of equally bright image-light on the imagelandscapeoccupying the lower third of the reproduction, which imagelandscape was an almost level grassland reaching back to a distant and dark-blue image-blur that might have been a line of image-trees or the nearest margin of an image-forest or, perhaps, an image-haze above still further image-grasslands.
The explanation for the strangeness of the image-sky and of the whole image-landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, appearing, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place sometimes called the next world. How else, so the owner of the book argued â how else to explain the appearance in each of the zones of bright image-light in the image-landscape of an image-racehorse with an imagejockey up, so to speak, each racehorse and each jockey having flourished, so to speak, at some or another different period during the past two hundred and more years?
The title of the painting that had been reproduced in the book mentioned was Immortals of the Turf , so the owner of the book told the man beside him while the two men sat and stared at one after another image-racehorse in one after another zone of image-light on the image-grassland mentioned. The name of the painter, according to the owner of the book, meant nothing to him, although he assumed that she was a living Englishwoman, given that the painting had been done only ten years before, that each image-horse had the name of an actual horse that had been bred and had raced in England, and thatthe foreground of the image-landscape might have seemed to some persons to resemble part of the actual landscape known as Newmarket Heath.
The two men mentioned met often at one or another race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne, although they rarely visited each other. During his rare visits to the substantial home with the glass-fronted cabinets, the visiting man spent much time looking into the collection of large illustrated books kept in the cabinets, all of which books were about horse-racing. The visiting man owned perhaps five hundred mostly paperback books of fiction, which books stood on shelves that he had fitted to a wall in the lounge room of the house where he lived with his wife and their children in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. He and his wife had agreed soon after their marriage that he would buy one paperback book of fiction each fortnight. It was understood between them that he needed to read much fiction so that he himself could write the work of fiction that he hoped to write and to have published. Twenty years later, the man still bought and read books of fiction although he had not yet written the work that he had hoped to write.
The owner of the books about horse-racing had never married, although he had spent much time for many years in the company of a divorced woman who lived in a house even more substantial than his own in a suburb adjoining his own suburb. Seven months before the day when the two men looked at the painting mentioned earlier, the divorced woman had learned that she would soon die from cancer. One week before the daymentioned, the
The explanation for the strangeness of the image-sky and of the whole image-landscape, according to the owner of the book mentioned, was that sky and landscape were images not of any sight seen by persons in the place called the real world but of visions, so to speak, appearing, so to speak, to the inhabitants, whoever they might be, of the place sometimes called the next world. How else, so the owner of the book argued â how else to explain the appearance in each of the zones of bright image-light in the image-landscape of an image-racehorse with an imagejockey up, so to speak, each racehorse and each jockey having flourished, so to speak, at some or another different period during the past two hundred and more years?
The title of the painting that had been reproduced in the book mentioned was Immortals of the Turf , so the owner of the book told the man beside him while the two men sat and stared at one after another image-racehorse in one after another zone of image-light on the image-grassland mentioned. The name of the painter, according to the owner of the book, meant nothing to him, although he assumed that she was a living Englishwoman, given that the painting had been done only ten years before, that each image-horse had the name of an actual horse that had been bred and had raced in England, and thatthe foreground of the image-landscape might have seemed to some persons to resemble part of the actual landscape known as Newmarket Heath.
The two men mentioned met often at one or another race meeting in one or another suburb of Melbourne, although they rarely visited each other. During his rare visits to the substantial home with the glass-fronted cabinets, the visiting man spent much time looking into the collection of large illustrated books kept in the cabinets, all of which books were about horse-racing. The visiting man owned perhaps five hundred mostly paperback books of fiction, which books stood on shelves that he had fitted to a wall in the lounge room of the house where he lived with his wife and their children in a certain outer suburb of Melbourne. He and his wife had agreed soon after their marriage that he would buy one paperback book of fiction each fortnight. It was understood between them that he needed to read much fiction so that he himself could write the work of fiction that he hoped to write and to have published. Twenty years later, the man still bought and read books of fiction although he had not yet written the work that he had hoped to write.
The owner of the books about horse-racing had never married, although he had spent much time for many years in the company of a divorced woman who lived in a house even more substantial than his own in a suburb adjoining his own suburb. Seven months before the day when the two men looked at the painting mentioned earlier, the divorced woman had learned that she would soon die from cancer. One week before the daymentioned, the
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