Explore. Experience. Express.

A much promised, long-overdue excerpt from our novel: Night Drew Her Sable Cloak...

Explore. Experience. Express.

A neat little tricolon in itself, the mantra has become something of a lodestar in our peripatetic little family. We wander from place to place, eyes wide open, oscillating between the competing urges to experience more of the world around us… and to record the experiences for posterity, for sanity, and for the simple sake of writing itself.

The struggle, if one can call it that, does not belong to us alone… but rather to all who wrestle with (and inevitably yield to) the creative impulse. The great Henry Miller explained it thus in his excellent essay, Reflections on Writing:

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

~Henry Miller, Reflections on Writing

And so it is that, amidst the magical time-capsule that is Tibilisi, Georgia, we find ourselves torn between the impulse to tear off into the countryside, to lose ourselves in the ancient mystery of the Caucasian mountains, to imbibe of the cultural heritage that has produced some of the world’s finest traditions (they’ve been making wine here for 8,000 years!)…

…or to sit behind our computer, to take the time to patiently parse and process this vast ocean of information, of history, of humanity… and to transcribe it for you, dear reader…

But it is here, in the quiet tension between these two impulses – to explore and to express – that we discover a kind of metaphysical refuge. Because we are never not exploring… just as we are never not cataloging, archiving, squirreling away experiences – a flavor combination here; a seductive expression there; a twilight scene that takes our breath away – so that we may deploy it later.

And so, it is with this cheerful synergy in mind that we present to you a long-promised, longer-overdue excerpt from our latest novel, Night Drew Her Sable Cloak. As you’ll see from this passage, written in the second-person, we were always exploring, always experiencing and now, finally, expressing. Please, enjoy…

---

Nota Bene: The following passage is excerpted from our second novel, Night Drew Her Sable Cloak, with special permission from… nobody! This is independent authorship after all, dear reader, direct from your fellow flâneur to your very inbox. As your unrepresented correspondent, we require permission from nobody to publish such extracts and snippets as we like. We do, however, ask that you consider supporting our work…

Right now, you can download BOTH of our novels – Night Drew Her Sable Cloak AND our pre-award winning debut Morris, Alive – simply by signing up for a monthly subscription to The Modern Flâneur. For as little as $5.88/month, you can experience a literary twofer right here…

---

From Night Drew Her Sable Cloak - Chapter 20, A Part of Life

And so the summer concluded without a question. We would return to Europe together. We would ramble across the continent, hand-in-hand, imperturbable, heads aloft, on toward irresistible wherever. For even out there, beyond the unturned page, there existed no real uncertainty, no meaningful anxiety of any sort, not with you by my side and I by yours. We would read each and every subsequent line aloud, threading ourselves into whatever narrative might arise, together. For nine short years I saw the world through your Athena gray eyes, door after door opened with curiosity’s skeleton key, opportunity colliding with willfulness, forever forging ahead.

Over in Scotland, where you unfurled your masterly thesis and I corresponded with the office back on Wall & Broad, editor-at-large for Tomorrow in Review, a flimsy publication that barely kept the lights on, but somehow managed to pay for the next plane, the next bus, the next train. Remember that first one? The morning after your graduation (and a “resounding commencement speech by Professor Dennett,” visiting that year from Tufts), the National Rail spirits us from Edinburgh (EDB) to London King’s Cross (KGX), via Durham, between the Moors and the Dales. A few meals in The City, none of which (I am sorry) include dinner at The Criterion, for that will have to wait until the accounts weigh a few more pounds, and we’re through the Chunnel, under the Channel, and shot, baby-faced and half-naked across Europe. 

We aim for the Adriatic, but get waylaid no further than Cancale, where we toss emptied oyster shells on the opalescent beach and throw back economy rosé. (“We’re saving money,” you tease, “just by eating them here. Look [slurp] another five euros we didn’t have to spend in Paris!”) In the Ville de Luminaire, we whittle away a week or two in a sixth-floor Montmartre walkup where, raiding the owner’s bookshelf, you decide that the wonders of Porec’s Byzantine mosaics simply cannot wait. We make it as far as Bratislava, but only after a massive detour to Tallinn because, as you excitedly point out, “there’s an overnight cruise from there to Helsinki and, well... Helsinki!”

How could I refuse, my dearest Evie? I could not. I could not.

From Slovakia’s capital we overnight rail right through Budapest (summers there to come) and arrive in Belgrade the following afternoon. The city is fairly bleak, but we do indulge in that Oblonsky-style lunch, where we end up discussing Tolstoy with the touring Czech couple at the adjacent table. You like the girl (died red hair, who agrees with you about the futility of Karenina’s suicide) and so, on the strength of your hunch, we take their advice and hitch a minivan ride to Sarajevo the following day.

“Much better than Belgrade, right?”

And you are.

“Just imagine,” and you do, aloud, somewhere along Ferhadijah and Ferhadija, “a city with synagogues and basilicas and mosques virtually abutting one and other, but where everyone considers himself, first and foremost, arm-in-arm, Sarajevan.”

So I do. Imagine, that is. And it is truly liberating. Did I ever say “Thank you,” Evie?

Enchanted by nearby Mostar, we begin blueprinting a Balkans chapter (you’re devouring Ivo Andrić’s Bridge Over the Drina), but when we arrive in Dubrovnik a few days later, the sun-broiled throngs overwhelm you and, espying a lightning special on one-ways to Istanbul, you turn the page and, thought clouds gathering into a Category 5 Hurricane Evie, begin furiously brainstorming a brand new installment. Silently apprehensive, I catch a side glimpse of your notes, “...lunch in the West, dinner in the East!” and am immediately nourished by your insatiable zest for life. “Let’s do it!” So we do. Lunch and dinner in the shade of the Blue Mosque quickly becomes a weeklong cultural banquette, and when we finally do cross that tendinous isthmus, the tanker-choked Bosporus glistening beneath us, the deserts of the Middle East seem as natural a next step as drinking a glass of water.

Enter the long Arabian nights. Too many months in Dubai, where I spin PR fluff into front-page editorial for the Gulf Times and a chance interview with Mr. Clooney becomes “my time with Gorgeous George.” You’re content for a while, but relative economic freedom is “hardly worth the prohibition on holding hands in public.” Then comes the “Dububble,” a co-coined term all our own, and we are off again, stealing across the Subcontinent ahead of creeping Emirati censorship, an escaping duo of unpaid Bollywood extras, hot-footing it past Agra’s famous mausoleum, on through Delhi’s Old and New, to discover peace and filth on Maa Ganga. (And a pretty serious middle ear infection, too. Poor Evie!) As soon as you’ve convalesced, we hairpin around Everest in a twin-engine jet, and ride the slingshot south, across the Bay of Bengal, all the way down to the Mekong, where we explore a temple dedicated to Vishnu the Preserver, overgrown and sinking in the land of Khmer the Destroyer. At the foot of the infamous pagoda, you fall to your knees and weep under a hundred thousand skulls. Unsure quite what to do, I crouch down beside you, and pretty soon our tears are filling the Delta.

The following month in Nha Trang turns into three when the fallout from the “GFC” reaches Hong Kong and your job applications are returned, unopened, or returned not at all. You are whatever the opposite of perturbed is... sanguine, optimistic, Evie.

“So, we’ll go to Sun Moon Lake,” you declare one morning, the salt water still drying on your skin at breakfast, “and see the night sky reflected in the ink black waters. There’s Taroko Gorge, too, a grand canyon made of marble. And...”

On and on we skip, past the emptying glass high-rises overlooking Victoria Bay, plunging headlong into the Taipei basin, home to seven-million souls hurtling toward Nirvana on half as many motorcycles. And all the while, you sing silly songs, “I been through the desert on a horse with no name, it felt good to be out of the rain.” (Except during monsoon season, when you cheerily replace the ‘out of’ with your own ‘drenched in.’) There are visa runs, of course, imagined-border hopscotch, played every 28 days or so. Korea (Seoul, Busan and Jeju), Japan (Tokyo and Fukuoka, twice, plus the bullet train out to soothing Nozawa Onsen), Shanghai (once when you were a brunette, twice more when you went blonde, because “C’mon, it’ll be fun!”) and a magnificent jaunt to Kota Kinabalu, where we ride a leaky ferry boat to that little island (you, alone, could remember the name) and feed the reef fish breadcrumbs squeezed from plastic bottles, standing in the center of a swirling, subaqueous cyclone, encircled by life itself. Underwater, overwhelmed, together in the middle of nowhere.

There were moments, of course, when things really did hang in the balance. When the rear wheel of our Hertz rental (model: Jazz, color: electric mustard) slipped off the gravel roadside, for instance, somewhere beyond “mobile coverage,” high in the Omani mountains. I had been trying to turn us around, a failed eleven-point blunder, when we heard the crunch of axle on rock and felt the sudden, ten-inch drop. What were we doing out there, anyway, wadi-dipping that far from Jumeirah and that close to dusk, with a trunk full of liquor from Umm al Quwain and not a wedding ring in sight? What would we have told the rescuing authorities, had the passing Iranians not appeared first, in a dune-bashing Land Cruiser with a winch, no less?

“Ah, but they did appear,” you nonchalantly observed, after they had towed us from the ravine, “and they did have a winch on their big diesel truck. And a snorkel, too!”

“And the wedding ring?”

“Let’s get to that when we reach the Americas,” you said, the moon, the stars, the whole damned universe in your eager eye.

And so we did, Evie. So we did.

---

We’ll have more excerpts from our second novel, Night Drew Her Sable Cloak, in upcoming installments… but why wait for those? We might get lost in the mountains… or find ourselves sampling liberally from that 8,000 year viticultural tradition and forget to write you!

Now you can download the entire novel (along with our first book, Morris, Alive) simply by joining our growing community of independent authors, readers and wanderers. Get started for as little as $5.88/month, here…

Cheers,

Joel

P.S. Dear readers who prefer the physical copy may like to grab one on Amazon, here.

And if you know a friend or family member who indulges a little unfashionable literary fiction from time to time, feel free to share our humble publication with them… or get them started with a gift subscription right here…