The Abnegation

legacy and ego death

The Illuminated Man

Life, death and the worlds of JG Ballard

by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan
Bloomsbury, 2026

Well, screw Sonny Rollins. Where I want to go is beyond Sonny Rollins. Way beyond.

—Sonny Rollins, at 82, on retirement

Kilometres above the Caspian Sea, I forget what it was about the boyish gloss of nostalgia that concerned me, reading Ballard. I am in the appropriate place to wake to such own-goal lacunae. Turkmenistan is as far away from my own archipelago history and its wrinkled mythologies and brutal magics as I might wish, but still I am unsure that I am not on my way into the same traps as Christopher Priest and JG Ballard struck. Or, if what we’re about isn’t the expectation-hopping many feel we owe readers, are there only the stories we have in us, without a choice to weed them for integrity? Just enough unpredictability to turn a page but not so much as to put it to fire.

In such a case, the art obliges a writer to gaze, as they say, gimlet-eyed at your soul. What you report back is another matter.

With my brain set to aeroplane mode, I cannot put my finger on where or even whether the Ballardian flow of surfaces and eruptions is not more musical than meaningful. (The window is rattling breathily. I am sure pressure is escaping.) Where is his gimlet? Left on a huge concrete roundabout? In a Shanghai suburb? In that semi-detached in Shepperton or on the bonnet of a classic American car?

I first came to Ballard through the Vermillion Sands story, “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.” Is that all surface and no gimlet? I have been back to it multiple times, which for me doesn’t guarantee perception, only dog-like hunger. Ballard introduces the book asserting it’s “a guess at what the future will actually be like” and there is something in it, but I’m fascinated by what is not in it.

That Ballard began fascinated by his rogue psychiatrist, spunky feminist (of a kind), lost investigator, psychopathic orchestrator, and progressed to the stage in his artistic and personal development where he had given up relating his fiction, at least, to the surreality driven by what he wove more realistically into Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women—a title perhaps supposed to be hopeful of indicating the feminism of the time but missing the point, then and now—instead, ringing the instruments he was now able to sound fluently and almost unconsciously, until he had the thing science fiction offers in greater quantities than the literary fiction of his day. A wonder of a thing.

For me, The Day of Creation is such a wonder.

Priest, too, was flipping switches he had some idea about by now. (Think of Detective Joe Miller in The Expanse—fine Priest title—flipping sometimes volcanically.) A player of his own soul instrument. Elsewhere, I have likened the process we share as moving invisible partitions around in the dark with our love. (Or maybe the nose.) To spell out what? This isn’t quite it, anymore. Not like the year I went around in the backstreets of North Melbourne slapping myself in the face muttering, Wake up! like the sort of person I did not at the time regard myself to be.

Much later, this is the time of my life when those of us who have had a go at making our own genres—or could not help it—begin to grasp beyond the once-numinous surfaces of symbols and mimetics which were simply a pleasure to discover earlier in our careers, that our contribution and indeed our obligation is the external one, of following the joy. That our task is to give the great music of it continuance in the gestures and forms made of our selves and our souls such that a little of its frisson might spark a little something in others.

Or simply to sound a music to which one, someone, somewhere, somewhen, might dance.

I do not know if I am yet master of such a level of self-ignorance/consciousness that I can nudge the pieces into place as they float by as my icecaps melt, so that that seem to spell something alluring and pleasurable enough to offer access to the universe while pretending the exact opposite.

Certainly to those paying attention, both Ballard and Priest surpassed paradox and infinite regression to do that thing. That peace thing[1].

That polished thing, come of hard work and curation which even without known antecedents, betrays what has been gained through the hair and fingertips from other would-be explorers. Self-colonisers, in the finish, perhaps, but genuine discoverers from their youthful points of view. Not ignorant, seeking to transcend.

Reading about reading, I frequently meet those who claim greater objectivity than the author. That’s kind of easy. It works from a premise of creation as a conscious matter. I valorise not knowing what you’re doing. Who does well at that? How?

Priest himself.

Even at its most cravenly commercial, art moves in mysterious ways the soul to contend to comment at the very least upon its antecedents, and more so, upon the author and the author’s world. A sink is not merely the sink of all the medical dramas before it, my sink is the one I would or would not throw up in, peeped over to watch my dad shaving, tried to convince my ceramicist partner to make. This is pretty obvious but mostly it’s hidden as much as possible, because who would watch an episode of The Pitt with personal sink history? It isn’t the fine affluent sink we receive, as those who fear art’s influence contend, it’s the sinkness the artist can’t help betray in assumptions and freighted memories. Art renders the how of sink.

But how the how?

Nobody really knows. Few manage to manifest it in more than flashes, or once.

The practitioner who professes to tell you how is lying to themselves or you or both.

(If I’m unkind here, it’s that I’ve left out the efforts which touch the inchoate using the tools of the inchoate. See Annie Dillard, and John Gardner.)

The non-practitioner is a collector, bell jar and killing essences and pins and labels. Their fountain pen knows more about the matter of live art than they.

I am being most unkind. However, those critics possessing the empathy to walk in the practitioner’s shoes will admit to the mystery, eventually. If deadline and space permit.

And the artist explicating fellow artist’s labour, or worse, their own, plays a double game.

In Christopher Priest’s and Nina Allan’s critical biography of JG Ballard, The Illuminated Man, we see (at least) three versions of this game played out.

Until the end of life. Beyond it.

This book was Christopher Priest’s last book. Others may emerge in years to come, as Allan consolidates her husband’s life’s work and finds the strength to lift it and turn it in the bleak Scottish light and set it down right side up and right way round, in sequence and hopefully with asides. Paul Kincaid notes the difficulty of such a task in his book on Priest, given Priest’s propensity to revise already published work[2]. It was, though, what he was working on when struck down. The story is told without sentimentalism in moving raw and broken lines.

If this is anything like her scholarship and energy and love, it will be well worth attention. Christopher Priest was a self-deprecating mentor—he was one of mine—an affable fan; he was a piercing critic, when persuaded to speak. Ballard, by contrast, was more than active in media quite distant from fiction. Both were prolific and devoted essentially to their chosen field, and both got the opportunity to break into the wider consciousness of the planet, via major Hollywood movies, but Ballard laid the groundwork to exploit all the connections—Oscar-level, James Tait Black level, sui generis auteur-level—deliver to the career strategist, self-curator, hard worker, devoted imaginer. Whatever the reasons for the differing responses and preparedness, Ballard has made his life something of a myth on the level of some of his subjects. Not the level of a Kennedy or Neil Armstrong or Marilyn, not a Nabokov, or Faulkner, but his own version of such a figure, British, as paradoxical, disputed, magnetic—and unlovely.

Not that Priest was exactly the salt of the literary earth. Christopher Priest once spoke to students—and having students is a difference between Priest and Ballard—about Graham Greene’s cold glint, seeing everyone and everything and every situation and moment as grist for a life devoted to art. (Priest and Ballard shared an admiration for Greene, well-covered in this book.) Yet Allan, and others not married to the man, write and speak of a kind and approachable person, generous in many ways. Priest had some of the ruthlessness with his own life and possibly others’, as do so many of us practising something more important than living.

But Priest demonstrated consistent impatience with the performance necessary to mould the shape of his own myth. There are a number of other differences between the circumstances of their fame, such as age, and class, and type of performance to which each man was suited. Allan touches upon all of these. Giving Priest’s final work some elements he lacked, a formal academic background, feminist credibility, moreover, Nina Allan offers another element both men lacked, or rather one Ballard only lived through in a limited, late 20^th Century way.

Allan in full sincerity and harsh detail seldom captured except in social media confessional, such as Hanif Kereishi and Naomi Klein, takes us into the end of life of a very private man. Priest twice in the book gifts/burdens completing this story to Allan. It is possible that in the hands of another artist, revolving around a death other than his own, Priest might have had difficulty accepting this as more than performance. Yet Allan’s own considerable rigour, loving dedication, and some moments of grace, lift this story from drama to a real shot at myth. It contains elements described baldly which the already-grieving couple themselves laugh about, a bible, family reunion, lineaments of reconciliation with his ex-wife, Leigh Kennedy, the determination right up to the point of forced diminishment to complete the book you cradle in your hands. For all of these possibilities for awful gauche sentiment, Allan instead gets down an immediacy she recognises as she writes is fading into story.

Story is in this context mentioned as less than truth by Allan. But of course the immediate kind is another variety. The right kind for her part of this book. The kind of truth present in the immediate surface of social media, which is underappreciated these days when we’re blaming it for everything, by Priest as well:

I do have formed feelings about the platonic dilemma of universal literacy, as it is applied to social media. Under the dilemma as applied, news in social media becomes rumours, information becomes gossip, and facts become opinion. For our present purposes of discussing criticism, I would extend this to literary judgements ultimately becoming part of cancel culture and depending on emojis for nuance. I exaggerate, but only to dramatize the point[3].

However, Allan is the one he entrusted with telling the story. Rightly, it turns out. I do not know if they discussed her approach. Work in which she waits to document his death—I will not say passing, since I find the term angers me—is not excluded by her immediate tenderness.

So we see in The Illuminated Man three levels of artistic biography. One curated and overtly personally traumatic, arguably a lie for all its confessional surfaces and structures, the truth resting somewhere between the self-mythologising autofictional landmarks Ballard rode through knowing what they were worth, and the abuse of his own history and inclinations in his science fictional landmarks. At first he involved us as he mastered the ways of their contours and movements, abruptly murderous or illogically tender. After Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women he played and experimented with meaning in the elements not fully mastered. In part, the later work was writing for posterity.

Priest’s biography is always submerged in his work and without two memoirs or direct mining of his own life for brutal or vermilion frisson. Priest’s existing memoirs are in some sense a deflection. Into interesting subject matter (Harlan Ellison’s landmark Science Fiction anthologies, the Dangerous Visions series, and its going off the rails[4]; Priest’s observations on the making of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige from the Priest novel[5] are two cases from which to argue the case) but deflection or at least a prioritisation, nonetheless. Possible to see more about Priest the man from the fact of them, his motivation for writing them, than where they sit in his life. (Not that he was opaque, but it’s not biography.) Christopher Priest was never exactly reticent about the facts of his life, but his biography was not mysterious, a shifting web of fact and fictionalisation, argument for an impression, and therefore not what he wanted you to focus on when you thought about him. He was all about the work.

And Allan’s intervention, wondering at her grief process even as she uses the—necessarily, inherently—exploitative tools of narrative to relate it and compares it impressively to some of the great autofiction practitioners. It is not going to be sufficient to walk Priest’s non-performatively led life to the kind of gait necessary to stride into history. That relies on chance as much as the work and the guardians of the work, the Toklas, the Brod, and so on.

Help. To prevent the passing.

In a way, particularly in these narcissistic times, a life in artistic practice as ruthless on itself as arguably it was on some of those around it, including as it does now such a brilliant demonstration that Priest’s deliberately different approach to exploiting his self-made genre, full of doubling and uncertain borders and difficult if not complicit witness, has a chance of purer reflection back on his art and its spaces in a way missed by Ballard in his fierce modern gloss, his duco and massively projected backdrop. It also has a different political perspective.

All three artists share the volumetric, architectural logic of dreams, conventions unquestioned inside artistic frameworks free of the need for discursive mimesis, free to touch on how living feels for these sums, these congregations, milling herds at the Netflix wallows, in our whitening sun.

My own personal experience of both Priest and Ballard concurs with Allan’s as to their differences. But I would say that Ballard was much more obviously steely-eyed when he perceived no enjoyment or exploit, whereas Chris was a sentimental man, a romantic in his way.

I will always remember him bouncing around in his chair with a childlike glee as he made some quite sophisticated point about people’s foolishness or the hopelessness of a political insanity. Chris liked people.

Ballard too, but he really took joy from rubbing elbows. In an elbow-rubbing situation, there seemed to be the same glee. Chris did worship heroes. I suspect Ballard’s seriousness and perhaps ego was such that real self-satire was problematic. Or at least very formalised. He strove to live amongst his gods.

There is a wrought sense to Priest’s writing which indicates that with each work the struggle of joy and drive against doubt and a healthy scepticism was joined. I would suggest that this was an element behind his work ethic. It is difficult for any human to maintain full focus on what matters if you are not pathologically driven.

I remember standing by a beach on Bute with Nina Allan, watching some crazy people swimming in Rothesay Bay. Nina spoke with some distress about Chris’s health. (I believe this was before his cancer diagnosis.) Chris stood violently hunched and could not walk far. I realised that this was a price some pay for art. He had made a choice. I said something of the sort to Nina, a kind of greeting card comment but one which has stuck with me because it is not merely an abnegation of responsibility to oneself and loved ones—the great man forbidding dinnertime conversation so he can concentrate on the muse—but loyalty to a discipline many artists make, that following the joy of meaning has its cost. We are not striving for immortality—not all of us who wish to remain sane—we are ambitious for what I guess must still be called truth. The joy in this is not simply a pleasure, it’s the kind that—well—cometh[6]. There is no optimizing this. It just—cometh. And god or no god, you have to be there.[7]

The Ballard story about editorial objections to Crash and the apocryphal inaccuracy spells not merely mythmaking but a relishing of his own demons. That a publisher’s reader with some experience of the psychiatric declared him sick. There is a sense that Ballard wished his concentration on fetish and psychosis to be accepted as an entirely objective take imposed upon art for the sake of innovation and importance, political and philosophical. But to meditate upon such material at book length requires more than intellectual dedication. Ballard’s role in embellishing the story of the reader—at the very least—contains self-mockery as well as well as the appeal to History above a narrow-minded reader’s head and both of these stances provide cover for the genuine interest necessary in Crash’s subject matter which must exist on some level for it not to remain a dry academic exploration. I came to this material as puberty hit, and it was not a dry exploration for a teenaged boy. Like dogs, teenagers want and want, indiscriminately.

In my twenties, I learned to type by copying long sections of De Sade’s Justine, a book recently legal in the UK, my feet on the oven door of our dank St Pauls Bristol basement flat. By day, I worked three jobs in Thatcher’s Britain and attended secretarial college. My first attempt at touch typing was a novel called A Fiend at Large, otherwise not really Ballardian, but inspired by Crash in naming myself as the protagonist, gifting him my biography, and circumstance. I lost my publisher and agent over that novel. It is altogether possible that it’s a boring novel rather than an offensive one. The dramatic tensions were not great, given that its viewpoint and world were both unglamorously if not realistically psychotic. Priest points out that Crash was based on not merely a fantasy, but a fancy: “The fact that it [a connection between car crashes and sex] is persuasively and imaginatively argued, consistently explored and has helped create one of the greatest novels of Ballard’s career, does not diminish this. A fancy is unworkable and untestable, and when pursued ruthlessly to the end it becomes a presumption too far.”

So why is it great?

My point is that the game of author identification isn’t one I take lightly. When I say Ballard was playing games with his self-identification is not to lack seriousness about his making art from his raw material, difficult matters. It is to recognise the point Priest consistently makes about the two novels we recognise as autobiographical, that they illustrated a problem of distance from subject matter, in the play of memory and telling and retelling, avoiding and forgetting, and churning internally while doing other things.

…many readers seek the ‘reality’ behind novels. An invented story intrigues and interests them, but they continue to believe that the story must at its heart be true.

[…]

The book [Empire of the Sun] was popular and the forty years’ wait for it to be written was necessary, at least for the author. What Ballard often said was that it took him twenty years to forget what had happened in the camp, followed by another twenty years working out how to remember and write about it.

[…]

Empire of the Sun is excellent fiction and it deserved the success it received, but others of his novels have a more satisfactory feeling, a literary wholeness, a shape, a feeling of metaphorical purpose. Maybe if he had written Empire after the first twenty years of forgetting it would have been a rather different book? [8]

There was a reaction at the time from the Science Fiction community of, Oh now you discover him, when his crazy shit is what we all know him for. But Priest makes a distinct point. About the way Ballard processed his life for his work. The story “behind” Empire, Priest points out, is still elusive, even after later and more direct memoir. This evasiveness is Dylanesque. Priest’s (Burgess) “fancy” and its implied frivolousness, even untruth, deflects from both the extrapolatory “fact” of science fiction and historical “truth.” Is Priest saying that it is also detracting from some kind of philosophical verity?

The modern desire for death being neither sober reminder of it nor religious ecstasy—a solitary lust aroused in the glow of a screen. New memory made out of the suppression—which is a kind of retelling and hence reimagining and reification—of the old. Is it real? Even to those ignorant of Ballard’s “superior” work, the weirdness, the daft numinous is there. How did Ballard reach the kind of moments lifting me in The Crystal World and The Day of Creation? You don’t have to know where he’s coming from to experience such moments and perhaps it’s better you do not. They come from where Ballard himself did not go.

Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women were more factors in the writer’s career, providing a mythmaking frames for the other writing, than novels at all. I mean, they aren’t biography; Ballard drew lines and felt the need to write one. But neither do they have much “story.” Ballard is an opportunist preying on his own life, and to do that, it doesn’t pay to work on the material too close to the event. You have to wait for the gimlets to fall from your eyes so you can make your own. It isn’t simply emotion recollected in tranquillity, it’s constructed. Or, rather, architected and engineered.

The only time I met Ballard was during his promotion of The Kindness of Women. I was working at Waterstone’s Charing Cross Road and, because I was so keen, I was allowed to see if we could get Ballard to visit. We exchanged probably ten words. (By contrast, Tom Keneally introduced me as a young novelist doing well in London—hardly—to his editor.) Far from the accounts of Ballard the affable and passionate, I met Ballard the instrumental and tired. It’s like peering round the crack of a door at the great man, but it’s also the servant’s view.

The picture which emerges from The Illuminated Man of Ballard is one in which Christopher Priest took in the Ballard process and projects as a human being and an artist whose understanding was a lifelong process for Priest. He was not a mate of Ballard. But there was a shared quality of the kind of emotion pouring from the fingertips in books which ought not to have borne such freight, from mere description. There are those who have noted similarities between Ballard’s work and Priest’s. This is fairly obvious (from description) but much more difficult to delineate in detail, if not vanishing when examined more closely, revealing substantially different preoccupations. Allan points to differences Priest mentioned himself, such as class and regional ones, education and genre. This last might be attributed to the fact that both had a relationship with Science Fiction which saw them both as outsiders, not that the author of The Inverted World and The Prestige could be mistaken for he of The Crystal World and Crash. That they were outsiders isn’t enough: everything not Science Fiction was once outside it. Both are writers, as it’s mentioned Priest’s book, better viewed as it’s mentioned coming from Science Fiction than from without.

And now that our world is all huge fandoms and sold back to us as future-in-present, understood as all Science Fiction, they are writers ready at last for mass consumption.

The two writers had quite different obsessions, though, prose surfaces, psychosocial viewpoints, politics (probably), and influences[9]. They shared a commitment to originality; a distaste for conformity; a view to what they might exploit of their own interests to make an attractive story (thought quite different approaches to plotting in the pursuit of those interests).

Priest’s fascination with Ballard isn’t pointed out in The Illuminated Man in a cheerful soundbite. I don’t think it would have been even if he’d finished it himself. Rather, the story of Ballard’s progress from his own fascination with the images and characters of his fiction, into problematic discussion of it, into exploitative fluency, is expressed in what Priest perceives, at least partially in contrast to his own fiction and ideas, such as truancy of plot, fascination with situation and image rather than story—the actual putting of the writer into the reader’s shoes as they read—painstaking language attending to visual image. It is frankly difficult for me to separate Allan’s views from Priest’s at times, which is cunning, a foil for Priest’s age and gender, and a genuine synthesis gained from the Ballard dialogues with her husband to which she more than twice refers.

I am very far from a Paul Kincaid, whose work on Priest is singularly thought-out, and backed by more systematic reading both in Science Fiction and out, of Priest and in following up his influences. I ask myself what I can offer in each “review” I might write. Since it’s not discernment—I find reasons to like so many things I read, even if it’s just as something for the joy of thought to bounce off—perhaps it is as a fellow seeker of the image, of the weirdness in the close observation of everyday life, of the density of experience and quality of motion through time, of the curator of influences different to Priest’s, Allan’s, and Ballard’s and sharing a number of seemingly random things. Christopher Priest was one of my formal teachers, as much as anybody has formally taught me. Many of those from whom I’ve learned about art and craft I have learned because I dove into what inspired them in some way, Balzac from Delany, Wells from Priest, Lao Tzu from Le Guin. (I think I was already feeling worried by RD Laing when I read Ballard. My sister’s fault.)

Christopher Priest probably taught me more by example than any class I may have sat through, even if hungover and in my last year of high school. His life was cautionary yet inspiring in its dedication, its awareness of ambition and its traps, its owning of error and limitations. His work was, even at its most self-referential, driven by play on expectations which rendered him right down to his bleakest fiction a wry storyteller rather than a formal iconoclast.

JG Ballard, as I have outlined, taught me a lesson I learned carelessly, one played out against his own public mythology where mine was opaque from my output so early in my career. And yet having learned this, I have been freed—freed I tell you!—to write more as myself in a kind of stubborn response to what I saw as market forces. These were created and astutely judged by Ballard, writing into the current age of plastic symbolism and narcissistic strip mining of the self. That Priest ultimately benefitted in the marketplace to the extent that he did was partially down to the accessibility of his plot as much as his own brand of fantastic surrealism.

Nina Allan’s work, about which I have not written but admired, in this labour of love, veers here into the territory I have often warned myself off: writing emotion freshly wrought upon your frame. In a way her other work, though deeply felt, does not. Of course there are moments when such intrudes into the work unavoidably. It’s arguable this is much more difficult and correspondingly rewarding than to recollect emotion in tranquillity, or a semi-detached in Shepperton. Allen isn’t merely tugging at heartstrings here, she is informing the book with the kind of context impossible outside collected journals or letters, also with the kind of present emotion in Ballard almost entirely sublimated, and in Priest rendered sparingly, subject to the exigencies of story. This kind of emotion, though not as raw in Allan’s other writing, is powerfully present, and a reason I predict that her novels will have their day.

The politics in Ballard are submerged. In Priest, less so. The relationship of ontological and epistemological fragmentation in Ballard stops short of the so-called post-truth 21^st Century; it satirizes—or perhaps slaps posters of images onto the walls of our minds—the political icons of Ballard’s own century without admitting to the separate existence Ballard the man was simultaneously revelling in and stepping out on in domestic, if not dormitory, Britain. That fragmentation has a primarily aesthetic collapse is perhaps a lack of resolution the role the actual suffering Ballard witnessed played in establishing what brought him income and home and security. This is reflected in the later self-cannibalising work, where genre is tapped absurdly and disjointedly. But I psychologize.

Priest’s political references are more explicit and darker, and although his self-referentiality is as playful, it’s also more artful. Priest was aware that the end of meaning has a specific political consequence, but less connected via personal history to the individual suffering upon which western prosperity is founded. He did of course acknowledge it in so many places. Yet his exploration of how his characters interact with the darker and fragmented societies and realities in which they find themselves is unparalleled in Ballard. Ballard’s world is almost always recognisable as our own, even when it’s completely shattered or flickering or gated or viewed from isolation. This is perhaps a kind of dream logic contoured by aesthetic principle, rather than a desire for affect. Priest, besides venturing into completely made up lands and histories, and inmixing the stuff of dreams, also makes our time and historical times strange. He was delighted by the prospect.

One writer made a mockery of the industrial dimensions of plot and reality; the other cunningly undermined them.

The Illuminated Man is not merely invaluable to those wishing to understand Ballard and Priest—not to mention the deeply weird and angularly strong writing of Nina Allen—it is a unique document that is compelling to read, a characteristically matter-of-fact puncturing of the hero worship for one writer, and a cornerstone for a hopefully growing posthumous reputation of another. Thoughtful, moving, and a must-read for anybody wanting to understand these writers, and their fields and time.

I must thank Nina Allan for bringing us this work, out of such a period of a writer’s life as would make many retreat behind walls of metaphor, if not simple avoidance of the subject. We will be the richer for any of Priest’s work she might make available. Her own participation in this production is brave.

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[1] I’ve already mentioned this here: https://dunningkrugerdancemirror.substack.com/p/the-fascination

[2] The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, Paul Kincaid, Glyphi, 2020.

[3] Strange Horizons, The Author and the Critic I, Paul Kincaid and Christopher Priest, 2022

[4] The Book on the Edge of Forever, Fantagraphic Books, 1994.

[5] The Magic: The Story of a Film, GrimGrin Studio, 2008.

[6] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2030&version=KJ21

Alternatively, not that I’m a god botherer, I am definitely an art botherer:

I shall exalt You, LORD, for You drew me up.
     and You gave no joy to my enemies.
LORD, my God,
     I cried to You and You healed me.
LORD, You brought me up from Sheol,
     gave me life from those gone down to the Pit.
Hymn to the LORD, O his faithful,
     acclaim his holy name.
But a moment in His wrath,
     life in His pleasure.
At evening one beds down weeping,
     and in the morning, glad song.
As for me, I thought in my quiet days,
     “Never will I stumble.”
LORD, in your pleasure You made me stand mountain-strong
     —when You hid Your face, I was stricken.
To You O LORD, I call,
     and to the Master I plead.
“What profit in my blood,
     in my going down deathward?
Will dust acclaim You,

—Psalm 30, Robert Alter translation, 2007

[7] Why are all these people smiling? I guess you have to be there.

[8] PP 269-270 Bloomsbury ed, 2026.

[9] Priest lists Enid Blyton as one of his. Also Fredric Brown alongside Borges and Bolaño. And I love that he loved Carol Shields.