"Under the Garden" (1963)

I was attracted to the title -- a slim collection of stories by Graham Greene called A Sense of Reality (1963). I forget where I got it. All I do anymore -- besides reading, writing, gardening, cooking and walking -- is poke around in thrift stores. Maybe it's time to add the name of the shop where I buy a book to its colophon. But why? Is it so important that I know where something is from? (To which I shiver "Yes" from the parenthesis.)

The first story is a long one, over sixty pages. "Under the Garden" is a work of automythology that opens with Wilditch, a middle-aged man disposed to travel, having a typically upper class British conversation where what is intended (a doctor's diagnosis) is merely implied. Faced with the prospect of an early death, Wilditch returns to his deceased uncle's estate where he'd spent parts of his childhood to dance around the topic of why he is there with the estate's current occupant, his older brother, and soon enough consider the source of a story Wilditch wrote for his boarding school's yearbook, based on a dream he had, but also on the trauma Greene himself experienced as a boarder at a similar school.

Here's a passage I underlined:

"Absolute reality belongs to dreams and not to life. The gold of dreams is not the diluted gold of even the best goldsmith, there are no diamonds of dreams made of paste -- what seems is. "Who seems most kingly is the king.'" (55)