Imagination and Reality

Imagination and Reality is a recurring tension in Hank Devereaux’s experience: imagination can anticipate events, expose concealed fears, and stir the possibility of new writing, yet it cannot substitute for action or reliable knowledge. In the classroom and in his private life, Hank makes stories out of partial evidence. Those stories sometimes help him recognize what he has avoided, but they also turn other people into characters whose imagined motives may have little to do with reality.

Imagination Without Action

Hank recognizes the gap between foreseeing a failure and preventing it after an afternoon seminar goes worse than he had anticipated. His prediction has not equipped him to change what happens. He attributes that failure partly to the visit to his mother’s house: its effects have left him disoriented and detached, not in his usual role as an amused observer. Even his uncertainty about whether this detachment marks progress cannot make the class feel like progress. His students, looking at one another as if they have forgotten why they enrolled, register the shared collapse of the seminar.

The dispute between Leo and Solange has already escalated before Hank arrives. Solange has been making sotto voce remarks for weeks, and Hank admits that ignoring them was a mistake. Now her attack on Leo’s work leaves him without a response he trusts. He knows that the class expects him to rebuke her and that he has argued for criticism grounded in goodwill. Yet he hesitates over whether Leo’s repeated stories have exhausted the class’s patience, or whether the insult’s timing gives him an excuse not to intervene. The uncertainty is not simply analytical: Hank says his imagination is still in his mother’s basement, where he remembers tingling fingers and the burn on his palm from grabbing a hot-water pipe. He wonders whether a cardboard box there held something important that he has forgotten. The unresolved memory competes with the immediate demands of teaching.

Instead of resolving the conflict, Hank tells the students he will remain silent until someone identifies a specific, objective issue worth discussing. He removes his watch and waits, turning the remaining class time into a deliberate pause. When only two minutes remain, he drops his forehead onto the seminar table; the startled students finally look up. The scene makes the distinction between perception and agency concrete: Hank can see the discussion deteriorating, but his awareness does not initially produce a useful intervention. His theatrical gesture changes the room only after he has spent much of the period inactive.

The Stories Hank Makes from Partial Evidence

Hank’s imagination also supplies explanations for other people’s behavior, especially when he has no direct knowledge of their motives. After sending Rachel Williams’s stories to his agent, he waits for her reaction. Rachel had previously submitted work but stopped after rejections, postage costs, and her husband’s discouragement. Hank knows she may also suspect that his professional support conceals a desire for intimacy. Her silence gives him no answer. Instead, while looking at peach pits soaking his blotter, he wonders whether Meg Quigley has eaten the peaches and whether the pits carry a message. He connects them to the peach imagery associated with Eliot’s Prufrock, then considers the possibility that the message is an insult directed at him. The physical remains on the blotter become a screen for interpretations that the evidence cannot settle.

His thoughts move among Rachel, Meg, and his absent wife, Lily Devereaux, without establishing what any of them intends. He checks the memos for a message from Lily, who is expected in Philadelphia, but finds none. The contrast is telling: the peach pits invite elaborate symbolic readings, while the missing message is simply missing. Imagination multiplies possibilities; it does not confirm them.

After Hank’s televised threat to kill one duck a day until he receives a budget, he wants to tell both Lily and Jacob Rose about his misconduct. They are both away, and he begins to wonder whether their absence is more than coincidence. From that possibility grows an image of Lily and Jacob together in a Philadelphia hotel room. Hank recognizes why this imagined betrayal seems plausible to him: Jacob and Lily have long been close, and Lily supported Jacob through a disastrous affair, his divorce from Jane, and disappointment in Gracie DuBois’s decision to marry Mike Law. Hank also knows that his account depends on imagined motives, not on evidence that the two are together. The scene shows how a coherent story can feel persuasive precisely because its parts fit Hank’s knowledge, even while its central claim remains unverified.

When the Imagined Scene Breaks

A similar process unfolds during Hank’s conversation with Bodie Pie. When she says she has suffered a heartbreak involving someone who should not be on her side of the fence, Hank immediately pictures her and Lily in an intimate encounter. He then measures the fantasy against what he can actually observe. Lily would have to become a person unlike the one Hank knows, and Bodie cannot simultaneously occupy the imagined scene and sit fully clothed before him, smoking a cigarette in her office. The cigarette, already half-smoked, draws his attention back to the room. The imagined lovers disappear; Bodie is still there, explaining that she left a message for Hank to warn him about Tony Coniglia.

The correction does not make the moment entirely secure. Hank realizes that a small interval of time has slipped away, and he has missed part of Bodie’s explanation. He asks whom she means, and she identifies Tony. Imagination has filled the gap with a vivid but false scene, while the actual conversation contains information Hank needs. Bodie’s warning is grounded in the room and in her speech; Hank’s fantasy is a projection that has temporarily displaced both. The interruption exposes a further uncertainty: Hank is not always able to account for what he has perceived or failed to hear.

Creative Attention and Unsettled Reality

Hank’s experiences of temporal gaps and tingling sensations lead him to consider whether he may be ill. He also remembers that comparable absences occurred while he was writing the book he carries in his jacket. Lily used to notice him disappearing during dinner conversations, and his daughter Karen later said she could tell when his attention had left the immediate world for the work of revising fictional reality. These memories give his present symptoms more than one possible interpretation. Hank wonders whether another book is pressing for attention, but does not treat that possibility as a guarantee of creative renewal. He knows that an author may be called toward bad work as readily as good work and that no obligation requires him to answer.

Back in his office, Hank hears the droning sound that had been present in the men’s room, then hears it stop. He notices that Rachel has replaced his damaged blotter and takes the old book from his pocket. Though he had intended to shelve it, he opens it and begins to read. Rachel’s voice comes over the intercom, startling him and prompting him to wonder which version of himself is present: the character in the book or the tenured professor sitting in his office. The ending does not establish that a new book has begun. Instead, reading makes the boundary between Hank’s fictional past and present attention newly active. Across these episodes, imagination is neither a dependable guide to other people nor merely an escape from reality: it can mislead him, reveal the shape of his fears, and return him to the work he had set aside.