Stephen King — Ur

  “When Wesley Smith’s colleagues asked him—some with an eyebrow hoicked satirically—what he was doing with that gadget (they all called it a gadget), he told them he was experimenting with new technology, but that was not true. ...

&  Wesley was an instructor in the English Department at Moore College, in Moore, Kentucky. Like all instructors of English, he thought he had a novel in him somewhere and would write it someday.

&  Moore College was the sort of institution that people call “a good school.” Wesley’s friend in the English Department ... once explained what that meant. {...}
   “A good school,” he said, “is one nobody has ever heard of outside a thirty mile radius. People call it a good school because nobody knows it’s a bad school, and most people are optimists, although they may claim they are not. People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.”
   “Does that make you a realist?” Wesley once asked him.
   “I think the world is mostly populated by shitheads,” Don Allman responded. “You figure it out.”

&  He might be a mediocre instructor, as Don Allman had suggested, and the novel he had in him might remain in him (like a wisdom tooth that never comes up, at least avoiding the possibility of rot, infection, and an expensive–not to mention painful–dental process), but he loved books. Books were his Achilles heel.

&  George Herbert was wrong. Living well isn’t the best revenge; loving well is.

&  In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

&  He thought of Ellen, ripping Deliverance out of his hands and hurling across the room. And why? Because she hated books? No, because he hadn’t been listening when she needed him to. Hadn’t it been Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer, who had called books “the scholar’s mistress?” And when Ellen needed him, hadn’t he had been in the arms of his other lover, the one who made no demands (other than on his vocabulary) and always took him in?

&  Wesley said, and thought–not for the first time, either–that curiosity rather than rage was the true bane of the human spirit.

---

& “... You could type up one of those books and send it in to a publisher, ever think of that? You know, submit it under your own name. Become the next big thing. They’d call you the heir to Vonnegut or Roth or whoever.”
    It was an attractive idea, especially when Wesley thought of the useless scribbles in his briefcase. But he shook his head. “It’d probably violate the Paradox Laws... whatever they are. More importantly, it would eat at me like acid. From the inside out.” He hesitated, not wanting to sound prissy, but wanting to articulate what felt like the real reason for not doing such a thing. “I would feel ashamed.”

&  He thought one of the universal truths of life was that, sooner or later, someone always paid.

&  He shrugged, typed in July 5, 2008, and pushed select. The Kindle responded immediately, posting this message:

FUTURE DATES ONLY
THIS IS NOVEMBER 20, 2009

&  Ellen was wearing her my-way-or-the-highway hat. It was insane, but there it was.

& “You can get the person but you can’t get the evil, Wesley said. The evil always survives. Isn’t that a bitch. Just a total bitch.”

& “You have no idea what you did,” the man in the yellow coat said in a meditative voice. “The Tower trembles; the worlds shudder in their courses. The rose feels a chill, as of winter.”
    Very poetic, but not very illuminating. “What Tower? What rose?”

& “All things serve the Tower,” the man thing in the yellow duster said, and touched the hideous button on its coat with a kind of reverence.
    Then how do you know I’m not serving it, too?

& “Do you understand how lucky you are?”
   “Yes,” Wesley whispered.
   “Then say thank you.”
   “Thank you.”
    It was gone without another word.

  ... He had a call to make.”