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A Fragment of Life is a quietly subversive and deeply evocative novella by Arthur Machen, contrasting the drab, soul-crushing routine of modern London life with the profound, mystical truth of the natural world.
The story centers on Edward Darnell, an ordinary man living a sterile, bureaucratic existence in a suburb of London. Darnell and his wife feel a persistent, unnamed dissatisfaction--a deep, yearning intuition that they are missing something fundamental about life. This feeling is triggered by fleeting, beautiful visions: a glow on a suburban street, a sudden shift in the quality of light, or the sound of an impossible, distant music.
Driven by this profound sense of discontent, Darnell and his wife make a radical decision: they abandon their modern life and move to a remote cottage in the Welsh countryside. There, they begin to shed their urban identities and immerse themselves in the deep, ancient soul of the land.
A Fragment of Life is a beautiful, melancholic, and ultimately hopeful work of weird fiction. It inverts Machen's usual horror, suggesting that while the ancient world holds terror, it also holds the promise of a glorious, ecstatic truth that can liberate the soul from the prison of the mundane.
A propos de l'auteur
Arthur Machen, baptized Arthur Llewellyn Jones-Machen, was a Welsh writer in the 19th and 20th centuries. He received a classical education as a boy; however, he couldn't afford to attend university, so he lived a life of relative poverty as he attempted to work in several professions before finding literary success.In 1897, Machen married his first wife, Amelia Hogg, who introduced him to A. E. White, who became close friends with Machen and helped him break into literary circles. Soon after, Machen also began receiving legacies from distant relatives, which allowed him to devote more time to writing.While he wrote fiction and nonfiction, Machen is best known for his supernatural and horror stories, which were inspired by Celtic, Roman, and medieval history as well as his own childhood in Wales. His books were popular, though his success fell after some unfortunate events-including a scandal from Oscar Wilde that hurt the reputation of the genres Machen wrote and the death of his first wife, and he was eventually forced to take on a full-time journalist position to provide for his family. This trend of success followed by poverty repeated throughout the years until an appeal was launched, naming Machen as a distinguished man of letters, which allowed him to finally live in some amount of comfort until his death in 1947.
