The Mysteries Of Harris Burdick - Some Mysteries Will Remain Unsolved For Eternity
Pros:
Where can your imagination take you? This book will help you get there.
Cons:
What might have been is lost to history.
The Bottom Line:
Will you soar to heaven? Will you burn in hell? Here is how you can find your own way.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
Some mysteries will never be solved. That's fitting. The human race must have something to humble its arrogance with. Some questions have no answers. Some things just are. If you are not afraid of things that are not neatly tied up in a package for you, where you have the chance to unleash your imagination, where your daydreams can take wing, then you can claim your freedom in the pages of this slim volume.
As the story goes, The Mysteries Of Harris Burdick started many years ago when a man, introducing himself as Harris Burdick, visited a children's book publisher. He had samples of different stories he'd written, but the samples were just one drawing he'd made from each story. The publisher liked the drawings, and asked to see the rest of Burdick's work. He promised to return the next day with more, but he never came back. To this day, nothing more is known of Harris Burdick, or the stories he wrote; only the drawings, each with a title and caption, remain.
The drawings are in black-and-white, and are mysterious, with some even being menacing. In one an ocean liner is being pulled into a narrow canal street in Venice; buildings topple to make way for its massive beam. In another, a young woman lies sleeping peacefully in her bed, oblivious to the opened book at her side, from which sprout fronds of tentacular growths. In still another, two children are at the shores of a pond; its sun dappled surface showing the beginnings of the fractured images of madness.
Though some of the drawings have children in them, and a few more have adults, none of them show happy people, or even those with some hint of amusement or good feelings. Their faces are either hidden, or usually blank, with the feeling of some inner tension or fear roiling just beneath the surface. All of the pictures are shadowed, gloomy, or in darkness; even where the sun is present, it is muted by shadows, the press of trees in a nearby forest, or weakened to a reflection. Where night has fallen, lamps give illumination that barely holds the darkness at bay; the boundaries are weak, and close.
What is the meaning of these pictures? It is difficult to imagine that they were drawn for typical children's stories; those of the oh-so-familiar talking cats or wise old owls. There are no faeries here, no gnomes or wizards. There is a scent of evil in the air, and the haze on the horizon is dark with burning and destruction.
What is the meaning of this? When your imagination runs free, it can turn equally likely towards dark pursuits as towards the light. Your mind, when slipped of its tether, may not seek the good. It is no mystery that these dark urges are present in adults. Burdick's mystery may be that he recognized these urges are even stronger in the young.
