Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [0]
BRIEFING FOR A DESCENT INTO HELL
Doris Lessing is the author of numerous award-winning books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing. In 2007 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in London.
ALSO BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass Is Singing
The Golden Notebook
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could …
Playing the Game: A Graphic Novel (Illustrated by Charlie Adlard)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
The Fifth Child
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot, and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
The Good Terrorist
“CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES” SERIES
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
“CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” NOVEL-SEQUENCE
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
OPERAS
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (music by Philip Glass)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (music by Philip Glass)
SHORT STORIES
Five
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories
Winter in July
The Black Madonna This Was the Old Chief’s Country (Collected African Studies, Volume 1)
The Sun Beneath Their Feet (Collected African Studies, Volume 2)
To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Volume 1)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Volume 2)
London Observed
The Old Age of El Magnifico
Particularly Cats
Rufus the Survivor
On Cats
The Grandmothers
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play With a Tiger
The Singing Door
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Going Home
A Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
African Laughter
Time Bites
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin, Volume 1
Walking in the Shade, Volume 2
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JULY 2009
Copyright © 1971 by Doris Lessing
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1971.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77763-8
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
This is for my son John,
the sea-loving man.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Category: Inner-Space Fiction
Central Intake Hospital
Afterword, or End-Paper: A Small, Relevant Reminiscence
CATEGORY: INNER-SPACE FICTION
For there is never anywhere to go but in
If yonder raindrop should its heart disclose,
Behold therein a hundred seas displayed.
In every atom, if thou gaze aright,
Thousands of reasoning beings are contained.
The gnat in limbs doth match the elephant.
In name is yonder drop as Nile’s broad flood.
In every grain a thousand harvests dwell.
The world within a grain of millet’s heart.
The universe in the mosquito’s wing contained.
Within that point in space the heavens roll.
Upon one little spot within the heart
Resteth the Lord and Master of the worlds.
Therein two worlds commingled may be seen …
THE SAGE MAHMOUD SHABISTARI,
IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
(The Secret Garden)
This minuscule world of the sand grains is also the world of inconceivably minute beings, which swim through the liquid film around a grain of sand as fish would swim through the ocean covering the sphere of the earth. Among this fauna and