Ancient Dreams

Dark City, dark strength. I move silently, killer, lover, all my dancing self a tribute to her darkness. My strength is sure, my justice as even as the weighings of a man’s heart can ever be. I watch the half-unsleeping tenements; I am Night’s hunter, and evil things dream much less easily for it.

A child must be about five years old when it first begins to develop empathy, that capacity of one individual to run a simulation of another within the brain and hence feel something of what the other feels. But what if a child begins to feel for an imaginary character?

I was eleven years old when I wrote the words that open this entry. For ten more years, they were the only words I ever wrote about Batman. I didn't feel the urge to add to them. I was, to tell the truth, somewhat in awe of those words. I had begun to realise that, perhaps, my talent with words was a little out of the usual.

I was fifteen when I wrote, "Sunlight drips through the windows and puddles on the floor." I remember my English teacher said, "You can't write that. Some day when you are established and respected, you will be able to break the rules and create your own imagery and metaphors; but for now, sunlight doesn't drip, and it doesn't puddle on the floor." But how else would you describe the melancholy depression which a boy might feel on a beautiful sunlit day when his grandmother dies?