pages xxiii-xxvi
Impression:
Decadence and domestication are redolent in plush suffocation as the man of leisure, Lessingham, turns to hypnotic retreat in an inward quest for the wild, inevitably finding the weird.
Discussion Points:
-the significant garden
-Mercury as the otherworld, compared to E.R.B.s' Mars
-The Lotus Room, House of Postmeridian Peace, windowed to the east, the Lotus Eaters of the Odyssey
-the starlight-eyed martlet as guide
-House of Heart's Desire
-the wild courser, totemic image, limned with muted exposition
Related Authors:
Edgar Rice Burroughs, ethereal artifice
Stephan R. Donaldson, escape inward
Robert E. Howard, the decadent garden of civilization
Under the God of Things