>it may be a wonderful, ever
unfolding, generous - continuously energized - journey.
oh absolutely Stephen, but i'd rather it was a reader's journey not an
essayists one - i only want it to end because i want my essay to end & for
me to keep the promise of writing it - It is not education proscribed thank
goodness!
"histories" of a particular metaphor seem attractive but the subject will
surely always disperse everywhere to no particular end - which might be
interesting in itself - but tracking the historical outcroppings of a
possible idea that may not really be there seems a Casaubon-like folly - I
have tho read a few good histories of this kind - e.g. Milad Doueihi's A
Perverse History of the Human Heart
It's Testimony with its long long Whitman-lines & very short ones which
seems to be at first the anti-Whitman, deeply so darkly pessimistic, but
finding the way back to Whitman's idea of territory & sacred/democratic
force from being lost in Testimony seems the movement I'm thinking on
>Just in the way I suspect Larkin - like him
or not - speaks to an English melancholy that, too, may be epidemic.
Oh really, you've gone too far! His melancholy is a particular post-war one,
historically situated
Edmund
Stephen V
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