The World

"Why didn't they know? ... He could see the darkness of their souls, the void that drove them to huddle together at all times ... He saw the souls, too, of all the other swim clubs that he had joined or visited over the years, clubs filled with equal measures of hypocrisy, deceit, and meanness, each one seeming to its members, as primitive societies did to theirs, to be all that there is, the whole world." Saturated with what he has learned of Classics and history, a 16-year-old boy reflects upon the flow of recent events in his own history: his discovering his Irish heritage, his loss of a job, his receiving an Artistic vocation, his traumatic experiences of unrequited love. These events become psychic cataclysms that destroy his traditional worldview and force him to create a new one. They also teach him what it means to become an Artist and a man. Exploiting imagery ranging from Greek mythology to video games and employing conventional and experimental techniques, The World is a passionate, multi-layered, poetic depiction of an artistic soul's maturation. Twenty years in the writing, The World is a work that should be read again and again.