Efesos, Turkey - 20061. “A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts, acts, atoms and wounds, love, indifference and dislike, also of his race and nation, the soil that fed him and his forebears, the stones and sands of his familiar places, long-silenced battles and struggles of conscience, of the smiles of girls and the slow utterance of old women, of accidents and the gradual action of inexorable law, of all this and something else too, a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself, and yet is lit and put out from one moment to the next, and can never be relumed in the whole wasten of time to come.”
2. “And if he regretted his armory of spines and his quick wild wits, history does not relate, for we must go no further, having reached the happy end.”
3. “But, as you perceived, this is a two-handed engine, a slicing weapon that cuts both ways, this of figuration – to say that the Truth of the Tale is in the meaning, that the Tale but symbolises an eternal verity, is one step on the road to the parity of all tales… And the existence of the same Truths in all Religions is a great argument for and against the paramount Truthfulness of One.”
4. “But the Laws of Nature deserve as much respect as any other, and there are human laws as strong as the magnetic field of iron and lodestone…”
5. “Do you know – the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination.”
6. “Do you remember – no, of course you must remember – how we saw the Rainbow, from the brow of our hill, under our clump of trees – where light suffused the watery drops of the indrowned air – and the Flood was stayed – and we – we stood under the arch of it, as though the whole Earth were ours, by new Convenant – And from foot to distant foot of the rainbow is one bright, joined curve, though it shifts with our changing vision.”
7. “How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence.”
8. “… I come to know you. I shall feel my way into your thought – as a hand into a glove – to steal you own metaphor and torture it cruelly. But if you wish you may keep your gloves clean and scented and folded away – you may – only write to me, write to me, I love to see the hop and skip and sudden starts of your ink - ...”
9. “I find I am at ease with other imagined minds…”
10. “I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messenger from some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth – my Love – there, it is said, for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to am man, and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world – a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity at my command. (Except complete silence, you will rightly say, which was out of my power.”
11. “I told you – I cannot think of anything without imagining it, without giving it shape in my mind´s eye and ear.”
12. “It seems important that these other lives of mine should spam many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch.”
13. “… I write to you as I write when I am alone.”
14. “Men tell what they Desire shall be or might be, nor what it is divinely, transcendently decreed Must Be and is.”
15. “Mine the long night
The secret place
Where lovers meet
In long embrace
In purple dark
In silvered kiss
Forget the world
And grasp your bliss.”
16. '...my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there I am, in truth.'
17. “Never have I felt such a concentration of my whole Being – on one object, in one place, at one time – a blessed eternity of momentariness that went on forever, it seemed. I felt you call me, though your voice said something different, something about the rainbow spectrum – the whole of you, the depth of you called to me and I had to answer – and not with words – this wordless call.”
18. “No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.”
19. “… poems are worth all the cucumber sandwiches in the world.”
20. “Such Tales men tell and have told – they do not differ, save in emphasis, here and there.”
21. “The grassy knoll
Shivers in His embrace
His muscles – roll
About – about – His face
Smiles hot and gold
Over the small hill´s brow
And every fold
Contracts and stiffens – now
He gathers strength
His glistering length
Grips, grips; the stones
Cry out like bones
Constricted – earth – in pain
Cries out – again –
He grips and smiles –“
22. “The individual appears for an instant, joins the community of thought, modifies it and dies; but the species, that dies not, reaps the fruit of his ephemeral existence.”
23. “There are a very few human truths and infinite variations on them. I was about to write that there are very few truths about the world, but the truth about that is that we don't know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend--not infinitely, but violently, but giddily--the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover.”
24. “… there is a truth of Imagination.”
25. “The stained glass worked to defamiliarise her. It divided her into cold, brightly coloured fires. One cheek moved in an out of a pool of grape-violet as she worked. Her brow flowered green and gold. Rose-res and berry-red stained her pale neck and chin and mouth. Eyelids were purple-shadowed. The green silk of her scarf glittered with turretted purple ridges. Dust danced in a shadowy halo round her shifting head, black motes in straw gold, invisible, solid matter appearing like pinholes in a sheet of solid colour. He spoke, and she turned through a rainbow, her pale skin threading the various lights.”
26. ”They say that women change: 'tis so: but you
Are ever-constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever-renewed and ever-moving on
From first to last a myriad water-drops
And you -- I love you for it -- are the force
That moves and holds the form.”
27. "We must come to grief and regret anyway -- and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities."
28. “Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust. Did you remark--setting Electrical Powers and Galvanic Impulses aside for the moment--how shy we are one with another? Mere acquaintances, if not on paper. We pass the time of day--and the Time of the Universe has a brief stop at our fingers' touch--who are we? who?--would you not rather have the freedom of the white page? Is it alas too late? Is our primaeval innocence gone?”
29. "We two remake our world by naming it
Together, knowing what words mean for us
And for the others for whom current coin
Is cold speech -- but *we* say, the tree, the pool,
And see the fire in air, the sun, our sun,
Anybody's sun, the world's sun, but here, now
Particularly our sun...."
30. “What makes me a Poet, and not a novelist – is to do with the singing of the Language itself. For the difference between poets and novelists is this – that the former write for the life of the language – and the latter write for the betterment of the world.”
31. “You know, all poetry may be a cry of generalized love, for this, or that, or the universe – which must be loved in its particularity, not its generality, but for its universal life in every minute particular. I have always supposed it to be a cry of unsatisfied love – my dear – and it may be indeed – for satisfaction may surfeit it and so it may die.”
32. “You know how it is, being yourself a poet – one writes such and such a narrative, and thinks as one goes along – here´s a good touch – this concept modifies that – will it not be too obvious to the generality? – too thick an impasto of the Obvious – one has almost a disgust at the too-apparent meaning – and then the general public gets hold of it, and pronounces it as the same time too heartily simple and too loftily incomprehensible - and it is clear only that whatever one had hoped to convey is lost in mists of impenetrability – and slowly it looses its life – in one´s own mind, as much as in its readers.”
33. “… your world is haunted by voiceless shapes… and wandering Passions… and little fluttering Fears… more sinister than any conventional Bat or Broomstick-witch.”
