Down the Rabbit Hole
The rabbit seemed like a soft and quiet soul, unassuming yet altogether remarkable sitting upon his mat of woven agave. I've known him for the whole of the three years he's been here, and though he never says much most of the time, I often thought I understood him, but right before the interview began, as I sat face-to-face with him, he was all too suddenly alien to me. We both knew this interview was coming. I brought it up the other day and he agreed to it in his deliberate manner. The rush I felt in the anticipation of demystifying one of the most mysterious users had faded.
"So where do we begin?" He chuckled.
It occurred to me why he seemed so alien. I had never looked him in the eyes and saw who he really was and what he really was about. All I had known was what I had thought I knew of him--and most of it was wrong.
The room we were in was spare albeit. He had a desk in one corner and a shelf along an adjacent wall, both stacked with roughly neat piles of books and papers. They gave the room a sense of fullness and purpose. Almost all of the books and papers were math or science-related, but he did have a copy of a dictionary and Finnegans' Wake, a book he's mentioned several times, on his desk as well as several half-filled in crosswords. "You don't have much fiction here for someone who appears to be a literate writer."
He looked over to his desk almost with amusement. "Honestly, I don't read much. The last book I picked up was the last Harry Potter and that a couple years ago. As a kid I used to read a lot, almost everyday, but they were mostly science books, because let's face it: Science is cool. How awesome is beta-carotene? Stuff could turn me orange if I wanted. Enough about that. Now, I mostly read short stories though. They're about the only thing I have a palate for. Books require too much investment." Short chopping motions he made with his front paws defined the bookends containing all the books he intended read. "Most of the time, almost always, I never read a book a second time. I don't get much out of it. Too much to wade through."
The tone of his voice changed and his deliberate pace picked up. "You don't have to put too much into reading a short story. It's there, you read it, you're done reading. With a book, you read, bookmark, repeat, or lose hours in its pages. Short stories also tend to stay with me longer. They're concise. It's like fast food. You have a burger and a drink. It's a burger and a drink. There's no appetizer and main course. It's all there. And what's all there isn't all there, because you don't see everything that's there."
His first piece of writing posted in the Art, Music, and Writing forum was also his first submission to the Weekly Poetry Competition under DragonMistress, and also became his first and only poetry merit, though he went on to win several more under Strop and ubertuna. Months later, he posted his first prosaic entry entitled "Reaching Out and Touching No One", an adventure serial set in a fictional worldsite of Armor Games. An earlier posts tells that he had been writing for several years prior to his arrival. On Armor Games.
"You can probably guess how I started." I couldn't. He didn't know exactly either. There were points in his life where things became clearer, epiphanies, that he took as new beginnings. "It started with Joyce, believe it or not. Not with Finnegans Wake but The Dubliners, 'Araby' to be specific." That wasn't what had gotten him into short stories though. It was a start, but this was the moment that he began to realize that perhaps writing was a possible avenue. "Then it was Hemingway who really caught me. Wait...." As he thought, his emotions were clear on his lapine countenance. They were more accessible than his writings. He was mildly confused and processing information. What he was processing was as much a mystery as he was. "Oh! It was Watership Down! That came first, followed by Tales from Watership Down. It is the most epic story for the rabbits!" he chuckled. "To be honest, even though I am a rabbit, I thought it was about a sinking ship or airplane that was falling. The title sounded cool and the book was cool, but it was an exciting fantasy adventure. Better than The Hobbit or the The Lord of the Rings or... well, maybe not The Silmarillion. I read those before Watership. No, wait, now I've gotten all mixed up. It did start with Joyce. But I frequently draw more inspiration from Watership Down and Middle-Earth and Hemingway than Joyce."
It was Joyce who had gotten him into writing, but it was Hemingway who had him rapt in short stories with "A Clean Well-Lighted Place". While he had always intended to read Thoreau's Walden, after reading "A Clean Well-Lighted Place", he said, "I'll never go back," with a grin. "Except for Harry Potter, of course, but I started that adventure well before Hemingway. That's what I like about reading. It's an adventure, a discovery, a new world, possibilities. I love possibilities. And there is so much possibility and discovery in short stories. We are given a small glimpse into someone else's world but from that glimpse there is so much to discover. It is like a painting. It is what it is, but when you look at it, you see beyond the subject. You see the possibilities and realities that aren't spelled out, but shown to you in subtle ways. In a way, it is also a window into the artist."
The rabbit revealed little about who he was and what he was about. With a name like Gantic, one wouldn't be able to guess anything other than perhaps a fantasy fanboy whose made-up username had no meaning other than sound kinda neat. Whether or not his username truly was an portmanteau of Kant and antic remained to be seen. Gantic had grown up in a warren, like some rabbits did. The seaside cunicular community was a quiet, safe, place for kittens to grow and nothing more was said of that beyond his love for the view of the ocean, that promises, beyond its seemingly smooth horizons, possibilities.
Next Week: "Like Trees in November"
