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But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.
An author's words, after all, are deeds.
The writer ’s joy is the thought that can become an emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
In the first of my epigraphs, Freud invites the reader to follow him as he unfolds the secrets of psychoanalytic technique or, as it soon enough came to be known, “the talking cure.” The magic of words and their impact on self-knowledge, self-suasion, and self-recovery has proved a steadfast component of most forms of psychotherapy, regardless of provenance. In the second, Freud tells Thomas Mann, a writer he greatly admires, that in writing a novel he has created an honest deed. Finally, Mann, although not responding directly to Freud, captures an essential truth about the psychoanalyst's joy as well.
I chose these three epigraphs because, as I hope to show, they bring us close to the subject of this essay, novels by Daniel Jacobs and Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau. Looking at the books first separately, then together, I hope to convey their pleasures and points of invitation to wander afar, as we hope to do when reading a novel. I will be careful not to reveal too much of their plot lines or major character developments, instead
encouraging you to read them on your own and in your own way. I begin with The Distance from Home, primarily for the simple reason of its author's alphabetical precedence, but also because it provides a felicitous segue to Memory s Eyes.
Let us begin where Jacobs does, with some lines he has chosen from C. P. Cavafy's Ithaca: “Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind. / To arrive there is your ultimate goal. / But do not hurry the voyage at all.”
He has selected the middle of a poem that captures the thrall of a particular place. During his ten-year journey home,