If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler

I saw a beautiful mare recently.

There is a great deal to explain about this sentence of mine. “Recently” is at once both specific and vague, and it establishes that this event still features prominently in my mind, and yet was not so dramatic an event that I was compelled to memorize the exact year, month, day, hour, minute, and second at which I saw her. You may wish to decide from this choice of word that I have seen other beautiful mares before this one, while also preparing yourself to let the continuing narrative change your mind. Perhaps I have seen other mares, mares aplenty, but none that I had previously considered beautiful–perhaps I had not even realized that I could be attracted to mares–perhaps my understanding of the word “beautiful” does not align with yours, and you have yet to discover this, having read only one sentence into my novel and therefore not being very acquainted with me as an author–in any case, there is ample room for the significance of this event to be further elucidated on in future sentences, future chapters even. The first sentence of a novel is always of paramount importance, as established by a timeless contract between all writers and readers, so you trust implicitly that I will deliver on this contract and make the beautiful mare central to this unfolding narrative. Therefore, time and again may I revisit this mare and how beautiful she is, or rather, how beautiful I thought she was at this recent moment, when I saw her, and over time you will come to decide how much you trust both my initial assessment and my written recounting of it. You may ultimately decide that I am not a good writer, or at least, not the kind of writer whose writing you enjoy, or at least, a writer who is currently using a style that is not exactly her own, which might in equal likelihood delight or exasperate you… you might read on, ravenously awaiting each next trick I prepare to deploy in this borrowed style, or you might cast this entire novel away from you in disgust, being so put off by the style that you will never learn how beautiful the mare really was, nor what features of her made her so beautiful, nor what features she has at all, nor her name, her cutie mark, nothing. You might deprive yourself forever of all these important elements of this important event in my life (yes, mine: we will return to this point soon enough), and I will never know it. This is a sort of power you have over me, and yet I have a sort of power back, for my novel is here, is finished, is published, is available to and beloved by the masses, whereas your immediate reaction of disgust is nothing more than a fleeting fancy that will impress no one but yourself. Perhaps eventually you will even realize this for yourself and feel embarrassed, ashamed even, that you dared to have such a unrehearsedly negative reaction to this, my great work. You will be flipping through a high-class literary journal, as you often do, reading with delight and anticipation all the positive reviews for new and upcoming novels included in the journal, and above all else, your attention will be drawn to the review for If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler. So effusive will be the review in its praise, so constant and convincing in its recommendation, that you will leap from your seat–no, you will have stood up already, so completely the review will have consumed you with its passion!–and you will march to the nearest bookstore, where you will purchase If On a Winter’s Twilight a Time Traveler forthwith… in fact, being there already, perhaps you had better purchase five copies, you never know but you might need gifts for your loved ones for some upcoming holiday! The books bundled, your money paid, you will hurry home and begin reading (for you are of too high a class to open the book before reaching home), only to realize, in a period of increasing confusion, that you have read this book before… that you have read, before, me discussing this beautiful mare that I saw recently… only last time, you rejected this account of events completely! And yet, what of that glowing, starstruck review you read in that high-class literary journal? And can you really put this novel down now, having bought ten whole copies of it? No, there must have been something you missed before. Perhaps your intellect was not yet ready to truly appreciate my brilliance and the depth of my admiration for this mare, but now you have matured, now you are truly ready. You realize, then, in a moment of complete personal transformation, the importance of the word “recently”! You were in a bad mood the last time you read this novel, you had just gone through a bad breakup, you were not ready to read about love, but now times are different. You are inspired by that wonderful review in that excellent literary journal that you read, yes, recently! An event itself is nothing, an event must be situated in time and context to truly be appreciated! Now you are ready, now the mare was truly beautiful, and you read on, eager to learn more, to learn those other important facts about her that I mentioned earlier, and if you are initially disappointed because the novel quickly loses focus on the narrative and begins instead a long digression on the individual words of that first perfect sentence, followed perhaps even by several further digressions, well, you resolve nonetheless to read on, trusting now in my skills as a writer, believing with your entire heart that there is a reason for these digressions, that they are building up to something truly incredible, perhaps somehow even serving as indirect windows into some central facet of this beautiful mare, contributing to your ultimate understanding of her.

For what is literature, or art, but the pursuit and explication of beautiful mares? When I pose this question, you understand immediately that by “beautiful” I am no longer referring merely to physical beauty. For all that we are two sides of the artistic coin, the producer and the consumer, we share in our understanding of many of art’s conventions. Reading this digression, you of course comprehend that a mare can be beautiful in many ways, the physical only one among them, and that there can even be beauty in a mare’s worst qualities, her depravity and horror. Perhaps you, yourself, delight in such tales, the ones that shine lights on the darkest depths of a mare’s soul, and the cruelty she is prepared to inflect on others around her, but we do not need to talk of that today, we do not need to embarrass you in front of your friends who may not share such proclivities. What is important to art is the fact of the mare herself–any mare, every mare–for what adventures can there be, what heroism, what grand follies, without a mare to inspire them? What do any of us do that is not to impress a mare? What passions are not formed in the pursuit of mares? They are individuals, but more than that, they are unknowable; they are life itself. Even those of us who are mares ourselves are powerless in the face of mares. We may carry ourselves bravely, may claim to be unaffected, but in art we reveal this true fact about ourselves. As a reader, you know when you encounter a mare on a page that you must now pay attention: there is something important about this character, something tantalizing, something that cannot be grasped, and yet you must try. If a character is not a mare, but rather a dragon for example, you can rest assured they are there for purposes only of the story, some necessary building block to carry the flow of events from one point to another, or perhaps an undefined receptacle for the story’s broader themes… yet worthless, not to be thought of or troubled with, as an individual.

Our analysis now finally arrives at my novel’s first word, my novel’s first-person word, “I.” Consider for a moment the vast range of facts, or techniques, I am bringing to light with this all-important decision! First I establish an immediate air of mystery about myself. I refuse to give you even the slightest clue about myself or my character. My gender, race, even my species remain stubbornly unknowable, but only for now: this is not your first book, and you are confident that before you turn the final page of the novel, probably even the final page of this first chapter, you will receive some more details. Yet those details may be delivered in a piecemeal fashion, carefully doling them out to you one by one at a pace that only increases your appetite for more. What remains constant is your conviction that I must be employing this narrative device for some vital reason: the use of the first-person is integral to the story I am telling. Over time you will learn more of the beautiful mare but also of me, and as the mare and I come to know each other, so too shall you come to know us both, and you shall even project your own relationship with us onto our relationship with each other, all these relationships growing at the same time and blurring into one another. And yet there is another possibility that you must keep open while reading this novel–that this all-important I is in fact I, me, the author, and that the character within the novel is the same as the author of the novel–that this novel is, or at least pretends to be, autobiographical–certainly you did not notice any such warning on the outside of the novel when you purchased all those copies for yourself and your social circles, but you can be careless, perhaps that finer detail escaped your notice, or perhaps my publisher chose not to reveal it so openly. I had not previously mentioned the existence of a publisher, but of course this novel has one… even if this novel is autobiographical, even if I did in fact see a beautiful mare at some point prior to writing this, you cannot be sure that “my” voice in this novel is entirely mine. Perhaps I submitted a manuscript that was profound, from the heart, unaltered, and uncompromisingly personal, and then the editors at my publisher had their way with it. How can you know what liberties these editors took with my work? Perhaps they altered the language in artless ways to make it more commercial… perhaps a powerful anticapitalist message, running subtly yet inescapably through my original manuscript, was excised completely… perhaps I never saw a mare at all, however beautiful, but rather this mare was added wholesale to my novel by the faceless, nameless staff of my publisher. This entire first sentence could have been added from nothing, could have no connection to the rest of the novel at all. Perhaps this is a novel completely without mares, and only my editors realized this would not be a commercial success, so they took immediate action. Even if I were later to try to address this question, these same doubts would linger with you. I could walk directly into your house; I could engage with you in a conversation about the nature of character, and friendship, and time travel; I could introduce myself unambiguously as Minuette, showing you even my cutie mark as proof, and I could declare in the strongest possible terms that every word in this novel is indeed mine, is my heartfelt confession, free of even the faintest whisper of correction or censorship from any at my publisher’s; and yet still you could not believe me without any reservation, for what if my publisher had instructed me to do all this? What if every word whispered between us is a lie? Instead, the only way you feel that you can be certain is to continue reading, bringing to bear all your existing familiarity with my existing body of work, comparing closely every turn of phrase and every twist of plot, until you can be truly certain that this work of passion is mine and mine alone!

But I have spent enough time on these digressions that it may be time for me to start a second chapter… I will establish only one new fact about the beautiful mare, practically in passing, before I do, because a chapter should end on a note of suspense. I want you, while reading this new sentence, to carry with you the sensation of discovery. This next point should come out of nowhere, should fill you with amazement, should encourage you to turn the page. Your own world should feel drab and colorless compared to the world of my novel, despite their admitted similarities. I want you to feel a chill as you read these words, from the surprise as well as from the winter that surrounds my narrative. Are you ready? I will even repeat the first sentence to make it clearer for you how the two should flow together.

I saw a beautiful mare recently. Her name was Twilight Sparkle.