Neveryon - 03 - Return to Neveryon by Samuel R. Delany

Author:Samuel R. Delany [Delany, Samuel R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780819562784
Amazon: 0819562785
Barnesnoble: 0819562785
Publisher: Wesleyan
Published: 1987-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

6. Though fragments from this adolescent adventure had been part of Clodon's earlier dream, it would be excessive to say he remembered it all—or that he even could have remembered it in such detail. Certainly while he stood in the Narnis inn yard, staring at the actress in the tavern window, we could write that such confusing and immature strayings from the centers of his own desire were precisely what he was not recalling then. Do the two times, therefore, present equal and opposite occurrences? Equal? No. Opposite? Well. . . But to the extent their objects mirror each other, certain instruction about what is to come may be gained if we turn from this to examine, say, the relation lust and desire had actually taken in Clodon's life.

For, in fact, we haven't mentioned the one and have only indicated the other.

7. In that age when mechanical reproduction had not standardized the beautiful, in much of his desire Clodon's wants in women were largely the usual for a male of his epoch, class, and condition. Like most men in Neveryon, he wanted a woman who was young. Like most men in Neveryon, he wanted a woman who was strong. Many men in Neveryon would talk of wanting a woman who was, as well, submissive. Frequently, though, these same men hoped that she might have some spirit. Often these men's brothers would laugh and declare they wished for nothing but a woman with spirit—though, as often, they hoped for one who would bend a bit to masculine directive. Which is to say, as far as spirit or submission went, Clodon felt just as ambiguously as one might expect a man to in such a time, in such a place.

But there were other details to Clodon's ideal of female beauty that (Clodon was sure) set him aside from many. He could not, for example, say why or when he'd first developed his obsession with women's hands. And not ;ust the hands: it was something about their nails. You must understand that, in this long-ago distant land, the amount of labor rural life required from both men and women well up into what you and I would call the middle classes was not such as to encourage long nails on either gender. But even as a child, now and again Clodon would find himself watching some woman's fingers, fascinated, when the nails simply grew forward enough to cover the crowns. Certainly the first woman whose hands had held his silent, if never articulated, attention had been his cousin the bailiff's wife. She'd been a shy, dark, gentle thing—and often ill. Clodon had been an intractable boy. But, in his early years, neighbors often noted how she could usually get him to do what she asked, when to his other relatives and friends he was simply and insistently recalcitrant. Clodon's own treasured memory was, at age six or seven, sitting in her lap, under a tree, in the leafy shadow, playing with her fingers

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