Passages: Daniel Martin's Hyperactive Imagination

John Fowles' Daniel Martin is one of my absolute favorite novels. Here's one moment I like, a moment I recognize in myself, and such recognitions are surely one reason we read literature. I could quote Aristotle here, but I'd rather quote Fowles. Perhaps some of you recognize yourselves in this moment.

The meeting began to loom large. It was not that I couldn't imagine what might happen, be said and felt. As at so many potentially fraught junctures in my life I could invent too many variations, almost as if I lived the event to its full before its limited reality took place. All writing, private and mental, or public and literal, is an attempt to escape from the conditioned past and future. But the hyperactive imagination is as damaging a preparation for reality as it is useful in writing. I knew I wouldn't say the things I was already rehearsing; and couldn't stop rehearsing.