NIGHTJAR PRESS 2022 (my previous reviews of this publisher HERE)
“…he never managed to swim right across the lake. He always had to turn back, even before he was anywhere near half-way.”
A sense of the half measures in Zeno’s Paradox coupled with the different paradox inherent in the anonymous mythology of a woman being able to be seen in conjunction with a swan but not with a man. But I wonder whether that was intended by this haunting and limpidly expressed story of a boy-to-man as a rite of passage, gaining childhood confidence by visiting the countryside’s lonely lake and thus defying his parents. But also unease at the mysterious depth it hid, that made him stop halfway. Till he grows older, and he has this story’s core lasting vision, and, even later, he sees that the awesome lake has begun to be contaminated by modern ‘progress’.
Who was Zeus in this hovering fable, I ask? The protagonist himself, unseen even by the omniscience of the words, thus left unexpressed by his threnody of thoughts about the past vision he’d seen and the more minor mistake he had made in its connection, or was it the man, a different man, with whom she had borne children into this world? A sad question. Whatever the case, for me, the result led a similar path, i.e. to our own global version or vision of the Trojan War with its once hidden forces soon even to breach halfway, toward the already baleful end.
My previous review of John Foxx: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/11/09/best-british-short-stories-2021/#comment-23446
Relating to the Zeno’s Paradox point above this is the first paragraph of my story in Ghosts & Scholars in 1994 –
“I needed Time to be a moveable feast, so that I could mould it to my purpose, bend it to each and every whim. Time endured more than its intrinsic length but, otherwise, was shorter than mere moments laid end to end in widdershins motion. What is the present moment other than a series of timeless moments? The past, contrariwise, was replete with nothing but alternating longueurs. The future – what of that? It would replicate the past, no doubt, but with newer and, hence, tawdrier, more uncharacterful pauses between its own present moments. For me, the flexibility of Time was all important. Still is. I live at the corner of sight or am the very mote in the eye as it stares beyond the edge of a sunlit land-locked meadow during an endless childhood summer holiday that has yet to begin. I was, am, will be one of Pan’s creatures who outlives Pan, outlives even the memory of Pan having ever existed in or out of make-believe.”
This story is shown in full here: https://etepsed.wordpress.com/shaped-like-a-snake/