I am still sleepy this early in the morning. All around me: blinding white. Couch pillows, wallpaper lilies, chipping ceiling paint, dusty bookshelves. Even the window shines eggshell paste, never distorted by what lies on the outer side. My pearly laptop is where its name suggests. I am editing, eyelids drooping, until…

The milky door across the room creaks open, and the muses, with their glass eyes, process in.

The first is Homer. She bends down and kisses my lips as I behold her reflective orbs. She sends her message into my head, mouth to mouth to brain, from somewhere unnamed. I cannot put into words precisely what I learn, for I am not learning mere words but opalescent ideas. After all, the literature of her past, as well as the literature of today, is simply an attempt to decode concept so that it may be codified onto pages and decoded again by readers. We learn most from the things not directly told to us, I think; and yet, this must be why all the world is lost in translation.

The lesson I learn from Homer’s kiss is the power of the spoken tale, performed and passed by generations. But this kiss is only the beginning of my odyssey. Suddenly, I am faced with the next visitor, Voltaire. His rough, candid kiss is one of wit and rebuke, a sloppy set of lips to scorn my silly white room. I laugh at myself. Third is Jane Austen, proud to open my eyes to the prejudice tendencies of the upper-class families I know all too well and the love that can regardless be found there.

Mary Shelley, skin so cold, fills my heart with adoration for Gothicism. I am disillusioned of “good” and “bad” and propose “healthy” and “destructive.” It is a shame that no one asks the villains why they are unhappy. Perhaps evil is merely a perception, conceived by circumstance. Reality itself—merely perception, always fleeting, never proven; away with truth. Charlotte Bronte’s kiss impassions me toward  a lonely self-discovery. The greatest err in one’s days is to waste any of its precious time being unloving. Edgar Allen Poe’s ravenous cloud soon engulfs me, furthering my lust for emotion. If love and fear be but bodily chemicals, let my mind be the testing tube to host all of life’s evocative reactions.

Charles Dickens is seventh, and he shares with me the essence of bearing great pain and bleak moments: one cannot love spring without first loving winter. Summer simmers when Oscar Wilde’s face meets mine, too earnest for an unworthy teenager. True art should not desire to press opinions onto the viewer but rather invoke the viewer to press opinions onto the art. My thought is halted with my final visitor. She does not kiss me, but rather holds my hand and sits languidly on the settee before reaching into her dripping overcoat’s pocket. Out comes a flat, rounded stone.  “Books,” she speaks in this room of my own, “are the mirrors of the sanctimonious soul,” and I think of how the line hadn’t always been that way, and I wonder if we could have been friends in another life.

In her words, I realize that all along I haven’t been seeing writers, but myself through them—for what truth is there beyond perception?—discovering the landscape of my being under their rays, blissful and searing.

Each muse and their works are missed calls, ones to which I could never reply, the phone lines of time slashed and burned. I wish I could reach back to that morning by the river in Sussex and somehow cushion this lighthouse-seeker’s heart—the truest ones are the most fragile, indeed.

Before her eyes leave mine, I say that I admire her experiments and dream of more to be had.

My muses, a kaleidoscope of culture, recede into their silence and stillness around the room; standing, sitting: statues. I finally feel on my shoulders the crushing weight of a world I never knew was so heavy. The years between me and such wonders...

They stab my soul. Time, the only thing known by all, knows only itself.

Can I value literature, the culture of the dead, before I too am silenced by mortality? Surrounded in white, the ghosts of yesterday and canvases of tomorrow, I do.  I know my path, and in binding myself onto it, I am free of the fear of losing it. I dare to recognize the paradox of art, its liberation and retention, admission and ejection. My muses are themselves slaves to that paradox, and I, somehow, too—to learn.

Lesson within lesson sung, the nine muses fade away to places unseen, and I wake with cleaner, brighter eyes. After all, the world is clearest after you’ve escaped it.

My computer screen is waiting, a world within my own, its keys yearning to be clicked. I am ready to begin.