The Hill of Dreams
1907
The Hill of Dreams follows Lucian Taylor, a young man of acute sensibility who drifts through the Welsh borderlands seeking something he cannot name. When he discovers a ruined Roman fort half-consumed by earth and silence, the boundaries between the real and the imagined begin to dissolve. What awakens in him there is not mere nostalgia for the ancient world, but a flooding in of vision: colors too vivid, presences too intimate, a sense that the thin skin of everyday reality has torn to reveal something luminous and terrible beneath. Machen's novel traces Lucian's descent into a life dominated by these ecstatic and frightening perceptions. He abandons the conventional world for London, where poverty and obsession close around him like a fist. The prose itself becomes hallucinatory, layered with the weight of symbol and ancient memory. This is not a comfortable narrative of artistic triumph but a darkling study of what happens when one person's inner life becomes more real than the world everyone else agrees upon. For readers who crave fiction that destabilizes, that refuses to console, The Hill of Dreams offers a descent into consciousness unlike anything in early twentieth-century literature. It is for those who have ever felt that the visible world was merely a veil.
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“It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.””
— Arthur Machen
“But he recognized that the illusions of the child only differed from those of the man in that they were more picturesque; belief in fairies and belief in the Stock Exchange as bestowers of happiness were equally vain, but the latter form of faith was ugly as well as inept.””
— Arthur Machen
“It was difficult to say which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered away to right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic and shadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and those who travelled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, but rather the uncertain and misty shapes that come sand go across the desert in an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan pass them, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed and repassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, each intent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity.””
— Arthur Machen
“This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.””
— Arthur Machen
“To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summer and the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odour of the night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was the tale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper and the eager pen.””
— Arthur Machen
“Here lay hidden the secret of the sensuous art of literature; it was the secret of suggestion, the art of causing delicious sensation by the use of words.””
— Arthur Machen
“He hugged the thought that a great part of what he had invented was in the true sense of the word occult: page after page might have been read aloud to the uninitiated without betraying the inner meaning.””
— Arthur Machen
“A great thing he could never do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and genuine pages.””
— Arthur Machen
“Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very far, all the long way from the known to the unknown.””
— Arthur Machen
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66f"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66f)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66f][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66fCite this book
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Machen, Arthur. The Hill of Dreams. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66f.Machen, A. (1907). The Hill of Dreams. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66fMachen, Arthur. The Hill of Dreams. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-hill-of-dreams-976f3f76-72c0-4824-b661-72add979a66f.
