Alan Garner / the valley of the dread

From an interview in the Times online:

"I've always been attracted to trying to find an explanation of the sense of the religious," Garner says. "I take it straight from the Latin root, religio: a fear or sense of awe. What is due - to a place, or a concept or god. That is religio. And from a very early age I became aware that wherever I looked or read, there seemed to be no group in the world that didn't express this in some form. I didn't go along with the notion, simply, there is a God - but there's something. There's a line in Horace: 'I don't know what god there is in him, but there is a god'."


...


That night, away from the valley, Garner and I sit by the fire as the day dies. The images of the novel, and of the extraordinary, disturbing place to which Garner took me, dance in the flames. "If I could see any purpose in life as to why I should go on existing - and I see this in everyone when they are working, when they are selfless in their selfishness - it is that they are trying to bring about the future. We all have different ways of doing it. We all have our tessera; like a mosaic. Some of us are lucky to have two. And perhaps we make a picture."