He clearly found a lot of joy in his work, and if you take him too seriously, as I think many readers do given his often grim subjects, you may miss the significance of The Lost Country altogether. I think his facetiousness is important to understand in this latest book. I think he would have liked the cadaverous self-effacement of the phrase, its mischievousness.įrom talking with those who knew this writer well, especially his friend and editor at MacAdam/Cage, Sonny Brewer, I gather that William Gay was a humble man, a bit shy but with a vivid wit, and a playful streak to go along with it. I think William Gay would have preferred Post-Mortem. The word has always seemed laudatory to me. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World.”

“Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt.