Older, but no wiser

“We think, sometimes, there’s not a dragon left. Not one brave knight, not a single princess gliding through secret forests, enchanting deer and butterflies with her smile.

“We think sometimes that ours is an age past frontiers, past adventures. Destiny, it’s way over the horizon; glowing shadows galloped past long ago, and gone.

“What a pleasure to be wrong. Princesses, knights, enchantments and dragons, mystery and adventure… not only are they here-and-now, they’re all that ever lived on earth!

“Our century, they’ve changed clothes, of course. Dragons wear government-costumes, today, and failure-suits and disaster-outfits. Society’s demons screech, whirl down on us should we lift our eyes from the ground, dare we turn right at corners we’ve been told to turn left. So crafty have appearances become that princesses and knights can be hidden from each other, can be hidden from themselves.

“Yet masters of reality still meet us in dreams to tell us that we’ve never lost the shield we need against dragons, that blue fire voltage arcs through us now to change out world as we wish. Intuition whispers true: We’re not dust, we’re magic!

“This is a story about a knight who was dying, and the princess who saved his life. It’s a story about beauty and beasts and spells and fortresses, about death-powers that seem and life-powers that are. It’s a tale of the one adventure that matter most, I think, in any age.”

~ Richard Bach, from the introduction to The Bridge Across Forever

Too many hours spent being way too serious. All work and no play; I’m becoming a dull boy. I sat down picking out favourite passages and thought: “Goodness, what luxury – I could actually sit and read the whole book if I wanted! How decadent, how self-indulgent, just to sit and read!”

So I shall. Princesses, knights, dragons and all. Maybe I'll even find some fairy-dust?