0-Epigraphs

The instant of composition keeps the memory alive, raw. He will walk forward, with pain and difficulty, into the past and make it cohere. The church spire is a needle to his pole.
           Memory Maps: 'The Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's
          'Journey Out of Essex'' by Iain Sinclair http://www.vam.ac.uk/


she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just within earshot of one another they seem sometimes to fall into dialogue and at others to be taking part in completely different dramas.
                       Written out of Revenge - Rosemary Hill- LRB Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen & Charles Ritchie Letters and Diaries 1941-73 edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Robertson


'The virgin finds pleasure in her rising desire,
The young tiger finds pleasure in his consummation,
The old man finds pleasure in his fertile memory:
           Drukpa Kunley’s “Sutra of Sex” (redux)
           Translation from Bhutanese by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor



I suppose the ‘font’ of ambition is the desire not to be forgotten—I would like to right [sic] poems for you that will make you the subject of thought and dreams, years after we are gone—Abellard and Eloise [sic] have never been forgotten—Dante’s Beatrice is still alive—Why not my lover, who will be remembered for his services to his country, why should he not be known too, because of me?
           Mary Borden (letter)



"Time wakens a longing more poignant than all the longings caused by the division of lovers in space, for there is no road back into its country.  Our bodies were not made for that journey; only the imagination can venture upon it; and the setting out, the road, and the arrival:  all is imagination."

Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (The Hogarth Press 1954), page 224.




 “What I said before about you & me perhaps is what really applies: we met on top of a mountain & should leave it at that”. For all his newspaper-reading, pub-going, and hymning of the ordinary life, a significant part of MacNeice remained in residence on that mountain top, and it was on its difficult heights that he was able to reveal himself more fully and humanly than ever before or afterwards. Jonathan Allison, editor LETTERS OF LOUIS MACNEICE


Memory
Is Memory most of miseries miserable,
Or the one flower of ease in bitterest hell?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,