The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I enjoyed the Prydain books as a child, but I didn’t love them. They
didn’t feel like stories. They were confusing and muddled, more like
real things than the things of fantasy. Eilonwy didn’t feel like a
fictional character, but like a girl I’d known a year or so in the
past—always a year or so, just long enough for memories to be muted
and the events of the books remain. Looking back, that’s quite a
compliment. I haven’t read the Prydain books in years, but I remember
the language as challenging a ten-year-old the way Gene Wolfe
challenges me now.

Time Cat, on the other hand, was wonderful. It’s a simple
collection of short stories about a boy and his cat, a half-dozen
history lessons in a few hundred pages. But those depictions of
Leonardo, Sucat/Patrick, and the Manxmen are still the foundation of
my images of them.

Lloyd Alexander passed
away today, surviving his wife of 62 years by only two weeks. He
served in the U.S. Army during the second World War.

Fearfully and reluctantly, he began to read once more. But now his
heart lifted. These pages told not only of death, but of birth as
well; how the earth turns in its own time and in its own way gives
back what is given to it; how things lost may be found again; and
how one day ends for another to begin. He learned that the lives of
men are short and filled with pain, yet each one a priceless
treasure, whether it be that of a prince or a pig-keeper. And, at
the last, the book taught him that while nothing was certain, all
was possible.

"At the end of knowledge, wisdom begins," Dallben murmered. "And at
the end of wisdom there is not grief, but hope."

And as his wisdom passes from the world, Alexander leaves us with hope
for his last
novel,
to be published this fall.

Mr. Alexander, thank you for bringing
color to the facts
that need it so badly.