The Best Craftsman Always Leaves Holes

For Christmastime and the turning of the year, here's a note from a
writer I consider one of the best, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

The best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration of man, which is also the celebration of God.
—Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet

Anytime you want some advice on writing well, re-read "A Child's Christmas in Wales."

From the first paragraph:

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

To the last lines:

Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Merry Christmas to all.

To Dream Strange Things

The job of the writer, said Nathaniel Hawthorne (American writer, 1804-1864, author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables) should be:

to dream strange things, and make them look like truth.

In his short piece, "The Hall of Fantasy," he imagines entering an "edifice" of the imagination:

It is not at all times that one can gain admittance into this edifice, although most persons enter it at some period or other of their lives; if not in their waking moments, then by the universal passport of a dream.

As he strolls about with a friend, he encounters some fantastic machines:

Here was a machine . . . for the distillation of heat from moonshine; and another for the condensation of morning mist into square blocks of granite. . . . One man exhibited a sort of lens whereby he had succeeded in making sunshine out of a lady's smile; and it was his purpose wholly to irradiate the earth by means of this wonderful invention.

"It is nothing new," said I; "for most of our sunshine comes from
woman's smile already."

"True," answered the inventor; "but my machine will secure a
constant supply for domestic use; whereas hitherto it has been very
precarious."

It is a charming 19th-century excursion into the realm of the writer of fantasy, one who seeks to make granite from mist, who delights in dreams of strange things.