Clark Ashton Smith And Books For Children.

' "Go not too often among ruins," said the Daemon in one of his rare moods of admonitory confidence. "For there is a strangeness in the shadows which these memorials of the vastness of the Past, broken though they may be, have thrown for so many centuries upon the selfsame spot as in the dawn of their erection" '
Taken from 'The Peril that Lurks Among the Ruins' by Clark Ashton Smith.

I am the type of person that needs brain stimulation a lot. I hate the idea of switching off and not being able to think, consider and be away from the beauty of thought, culture and the world of ideas... hopefully saying this doesn't make me sound like a knob.
It is my view that I can stop thinking when I'm dead, so until then I can enjoy a life of constant thinking, reading, writing, memorizing and so forth... because the inner world and my interaction with and understanding of it is the best way to attain any form of paradise in this life... for me anyway.
One way that I keep beauty and mind stimulation by my side is memorizing stuff that sounds good; poetry, quotes, anything that brings me that feeling that I have bettered myself from learning. One thing that I have done is memorize (mostly) the prose type poem, 'The Peril that Lurks Among the Ruins' by Clark Ashton Smith. I have known the poem for quite some time now and I have loved the imagery that comes from it.

 The above picture is what instantly drew me to Smith. I looked at that picture and thought,
"What a dude! What is this soulful looking person all about then?"
The picture itself is a work of art, something that I would love to have on my wall.
Smith is one of my greatest inspirations at the moment...  Hermann Hesse is the other one.

One other subject that has been in my thoughts is books for children. In the last blog post I copied out a quote from a book in the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, a quote that has been with me since I was about ten.
It got me thinking about perhaps writing something for kids. When I was young, my life or the perception of what I was capable of changed when I read the Redwall books. I identified with the heroes who rose up from being normal kids and through a crisis that was caused by an opposing character, the hero becomes the person they were meant to be. I always liked the message that the Redwall series gave, doing the right thing, having compassion and so forth.
But if I was to write a story what would be the message that I would want to give kids? I suppose I would want to encourage them to think for themselves, to have principles and to know the ins and outs of human nature and encourage them to nourish their minds as well as the rest of them, give them the urge for self exploration... as well as other good things.

The mind is the throne of a persons reality. I suppose if you can improve it then reality morphs into something far greater.

Over and Out.
ED.