Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril by Judith & 1923 Merril Emily Pohl-Weary

Author:Judith & 1923 Merril, Emily Pohl-Weary [Judith & Pohl-Weary, 1923 Merril, Emily]
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction, General, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Literary, Biography & Autobiography, Autobiography, Biography: general, 20th century, Biography, Language Arts & Disciplines, Authors; American, Authors; Canadian (English) 20th century Biography, Merril; Judith; 1923, Authors; Canadian, Politics & government, Merril; Judith; 1923-, Authorship, Canadian, Biography: Historical; Political & Military, Literature: Texts, American
ISBN: 9781896357577
Publisher: Between the Lines(CA)
Published: 2002-04-18T23:00:00+00:00

Mark and I met, in person, on only one occasion: the Thirteenth World Science Fiction Convention, in Cleveland, in the summer of 1955 (where he and Frank Riley took the Hugo award for the novel They'd Rather Be Right). The meeting was cordial—at times delightful—but some curious inverse chemistry sent each of us away with a sorely wounded sense of rejection by the other. The feeling was strong enough that neither of us found a way to articulate it until several years later. Our correspondence lapsed entirely for a while, and when it resumed (for another five years) it was both less obsessive and more intimate—rather like the letters of old, fond, but spent, lovers.

We were, of course, never lovers in the usual explicit sense. Indeed, the symbol of rejection on each side in Cleveland was our failure even to embrace upon meeting. And it may well have been that this wounding abstention was necessary: that the sort of sounding-board function we served for each other, through most of a decade of critical experience for both of us, could only work between people whose actual physical lives were in no way interconnected: that we were instinctively, however painfully, protecting the very meaning-fullness of the relationship.

In any case, most of my thinking and awareness, during that dramatic fourth decade of my life, was filtered, or refracted, through Mark's extraordinary perceptions, and modified by his philosophies. Of course, I was not alone in this. Everyone who read his prolific output (in the days when other writers irritably referred to Astounding as the "Clifton House Organ") shared the experience to some extent. Because the important thing to understand about Clifton is just He meant every word of it.

When he was not writing simply out of his personal history, he was writing with excruciating honesty out of his personal beliefs and ideals. Among these were his years of "extrasensory" or "paranormal" phenomena—and his years of practice of one particular ability—a sort of hyper-empathy that he called

"somming" (from somatic), because it required the physical presence of the other person, and which consisted of experiencing the other's somatic awareness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.