“I’m so glad I was a kid before the Internet.
In a dark corner of my elementary school library, there was a four-foot section about ghosts, missing people, UFOs, and Bigfoot—and that’s where I went when all the other kids got books about sharks or motorcycles. I read them over and over again, believing every word. There wasn’t yet a worldwide network, the shared knowledge of humanity, to contradict them.
In other words, I could be credulous.”

— Will Ludwigsen, Foreward, “In Search Of and Others”.

I am excited to receive this volume, recommended here on FB by a man whose work has deeply influenced my own, Lucius Shepard. And this paragraph is so apt that I could have penned it myself, although I lived not only before the internet but before computers as we know them today.

But I am somewhat disappointed in the author’s Foreward, which introduces the wonder of anomalous human thought and experience (and rightly identifies it as a sign of revolutionary curiosity) only to write it off a few moments later as a bad case of naive confusion, “An extended last gasp of Aquarian Age reasoning,” easily and necessarily dismissed by mere exposure to modern knowledge networks.

Excuse me?

He apparently decided that wonder was a line that science could draw so clearly that it banished its sources in dreaming and deep relation. Forgetting, of course, that literality is -the illusion produced only by the reduction of wonder to its skeletal sources-. There is no literality. At all.

Nothing is more simple that debunking a kiss. Especially if you have never become one. To his credit, however, he recovers somewhat, “The truth that paralyzed me twenty years ago has come full circle: you don’t find magic, but make it.” Yes, that is part of the answer. But there is more. Much more. He is the sign he was seeking. So, too, am I. And if I were to show Mr. Ludwigsen the slightest hint of what he, himself, is carrying, frankly, I think he would need a diaper, not a bar graph.

Then again, upon delving into the first story, which is good enough that I will record a reading of it later which you can enjoy, I am reminded that I should suspend my judgments and take a longer view. His mind is deep, powerful, and inspired… in its own peculiarly unmagical magical way…