Reading Zelazny is like dropping into a Mozart string quartet as played by Thelonius Monk

--Greg Bear
I couldn't agree more! I've been reading an anthology of Roger Zelazny's early works, genius in the rough. I am especially enjoying his notes and commentary adended to each piece. A Rose for Ecclesiastes was poignant and agonizingly fraught with the the disappointments of the human experience; Certain lines scattered like gems throughout the piece resonate across the spectrum of humanity;

No! Never interpret Roses! Don't. Smell them . . ., pick them, enjoy them. Live in the moment. Hold to it tightly, but charge not the gods to explain. So fast the leaves go by, are blown . . .

And no one ever noticed us. Or cared.

***

The added years of service were so many added tails to the cat repeatedly laid on my back.

***

And I came to the land where the sun is a tarnished penny, where the wind is a whip, where two moons play at hotrod games, and a hell of sand gives you the incendiary itches whenever you look at it.

I also loved The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth. It was compared to Moby Dick by some critics, but I think The Old Man and the Sea would be a more apt parallel. I enjoyed the journey, and the world he created to contain it. His metaphores fire my imagination.

And I dream about those eyes. I want to face them once more, even if their finding takes forever. I've got to know if there's something inside me that sets me apart from a rabbit, from notched plates of reflexes and instincts that always fall apart in exactly the same way whenever the proper combination is spun.

In one of his notes, Zelazny discussed an accumulation of early material that had been rejected by publishers. I appreciate his comments concerning these, and feel that they can be applied to many aspects of work that we as humans create to express ourselves;

"One thing struck me about all of them: I was overexplaining. I was describing settings, events and character motivations in too much detail. I decided, in viewing these stories now that they had grown cold, that I would find it insulting to have anyone explain anything to me at that length. I resolved therafter to treat the reader as I would be treated myself, to avoid the unnecessarily explicit, to use more indirection with respect to character and motivation, to draw myself up short whenever I felt the tendency to go on talking once a thing had been shown."