I stopped listening to Pink Floyd during college, too. Indeed, it took me a while to realize that I had given anything up at all. I had read less and less of it as I made my way through high school, replacing it with Modernists and playwrights, and so it wasn't a difficult addiction to give up. I stopped reading science fiction sometime during college. Cogswell's story 'The Wall Around the World,' the protagonist, Porgie, is fourteen, 'an age that tends to view the word impossible as a meaningless term invented by adults for their own peculiar purposes.' The president of East Germany, Erich Honeker, resigned on October 18, one day after my fourteenth birthday.Īt the beginning of Theodore R. 'Interval' derives from intervallum, 'between the ramparts,' while 'intramural' comes from adding the Latin prefix intra (within) to murus: 'within the walls.'ĭemolition of the Berlin Wall began in 1989. The Latin word for 'wall' in the sense we know was murus, from which come the English words 'mural' and 'immure' (to imprison or entomb between walls). Other portions ended up being used over the centuries to build houses, roads, and other walls. Portions remain today and are some of the most popular tourist destinations in northern England. The wall took about ten years to build, and covered seventy-three miles. Vallum was also a term used for the earthen fortification behind Hadrian's Wall, which the Romans began building in 122 to defend against various groups, particularly Celtic tribes. To a Roman, a wall ( vallum) was a rampart constructed from stakes ( vallus), a defensive structure. The English language stole 'wall' from Latin, washing out its meaning in the process. I find now that when I think about science fiction, I also think about walls, about borders and barriers, about things sheltered, barricaded, delineated, excluded. Shadows of the old passions linger, though, casting themselves across the ever-expanding landscape of memory. My passions have shifted over the years, of course, because each year brings different books to read and different music to listen to, and experiences can't help but etch contours into our aesthetics. I had been a passionate reader of science fiction for a few years before I became, in high school, a passionate fan of the Pink Floyd album The Wall.

Kelly vallum farms