WALTER MOSLEY
FORTY-FOUR YEARS AGO, I came across a passage that changed my life. I was a teenager then, reading just about anything that struck my fancy. In those days I was pretty much an unconscious reader taking in one book after another looking for good stories. When I was finished with one novel it receded into the background and made way for the next. I had no notion of becoming a writer. Writers were, for me, long-dead practitioners of a lost art.
And so it went. I read, let’s say, Treasure Island by Stevenson, then Demian by Hesse, and on to The Long Goodbye. One page after the other went by and I was as happy (and as unaware) as a clam. And then two sentences, toward the end of the novel, shook me from my waking slumber. It was like a one-two combination punch. The jab was a man, a dangerous man, looking at the protagonist without the slightest concern. He had a gun but didn’t bother lifting it. He was sitting down but saw no reason to stand. And then came the straight right cross: The first-person narrator told me that this dangerous man was as calm as an adobe wall in the moonlight.
I was overcome by an image that I had seen many times but that I had never stopped to mark in my mind. It took Raymond Chandler to show me something that I already knew but had never been aware of. Adobe walls in the lunar light of the southern California desert had the most passive demeanor—they were the ideal of peacefulness.
Then the writer contrasts this nearly absolute tranquility to an armed and dangerous man . . . For the first time I understood the power of language to reach beyond the real into the metaphysical and into metaphor.
Those twenty-four words alerted me to the potential power of writing. It was a step beyond the limitations of the physical world into a realm where a thing and its opposite could meet and magically become something else.