Читать книгу Montesereno - Benjamin W. Farley - Страница 6

The idea for Montesereno was inspired by two principal events, if we may call them “events.” The first owes its inception to the many visits my wife and I have made over the years to the Pisgah Inn and its panoramic view of the mountains, west of Asheville. The drive to the Inn, through the Parkway’s many tunnels, past its oaks and firs, wildflowers, cliffs and laurel has always cast a spell of wonder and solace, regardless the season. Walking the Inn’s grounds, its narrow trails, and staring far off across range after range of distant mountains, as well as gaping down into its sunlit or shadowed coves has equally provided levels of restful calm. So I set Montesereno and its villa grounds in a wistful location similar to the grandeur of the Parkway’s scene.

The second “event” is traceable to reading Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and the revelation of those unchartered vistas and thwarted delusions so common in our society today. Could the two realities—the unquiet mind and the healing solace of the Parkway’s mountains—be woven into a story worth exploring and telling? As one who is not a psychologist but a professor emeritus of philosophy and religion, I began perusing the more current common disorders to create a cadre of characters and situations to match the characters’ needs and the disorders’ symptoms. Thus did the story evolve. I began it in 2009, and have worked on it each year since. It is far from the dream novel I wanted to write, nor are its characters perfect in any way, let alone its central figure—Darby Peterson, PhD, retired professor of philosophy. But I sensed it was time to conclude the adventure and bring its hero and his hopes to an acceptable denouement. I can only hope readers enjoy it, or find it to be of some value, or at least worth reading, as much as I felt driven to write it. As the old Greek playwrights used to say: “So hath it fallen here.”

Columbia, South Carolina, 2018