Possession

by A.S. Byatt

In his day, he said, students were grounded in spelling and had learned poetry and the Bible by heart. An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. “ ‘Felt along the heart,’ as Wordsworth said,” Blackadder said.

‘If you can order your Thoughts and shape them into Art, good: if you can live in the obligations and affections of Daily Life, good. But do not get into the habit of morbid Self-examination. Nothing so unfits a woman for producing good work, or for living usefully. The Lord will take care of the second of these—opportunities will be found. The first is a matter of Will.’ ”

About agoraphobia and claustrophobia and the paradoxical desire to be let out into unconfined space, the wild moorland, the open ground, and at the same time to be closed into tighter and tighter impenetrable small spaces—like Emily Dickinson’s voluntary confinement, like the Sibyl’s jar.”

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance.

live circumscribed and self-communing—’tis best so—not like a Princess in a thicket, by no means, but more like a very fat and self-satisfied Spider in the centre of her shining Web, if you will forgive me the slightly disagreeable Analogy.

Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going.

Letters, finally, exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader; they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader.

her prying curiosity about whatever had been Christabel’s life, seemed suddenly to be the ghostly things, feeding on, living through, the young vitality of the past.

An Egg, Sir, is the answer, as you perspicuously read from the beginning, an Egg, a perfect O, a living Stone, doorless and windowless, whose life may slumber on till she be Waked—or find she has Wings to spread—which is not so here—oh no— An Egg is my answer. What is the Riddle? I

Do you know—the only life I am sure of is the life of the Imagination.

Now on the level of tales, you know, all prohibitions are made only to be broken, must be broken

pavements are free places.

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.

She’s on record as admiring the heroism of Mary Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt from the same bridge. She obviously noted that Wollstonecraft found it hard to sink, because of her clothes floating.”

It is odd, when I think of it, that in chess the female may make the large runs and cross freely in all ways—in life it is much otherwise.

He would teach her that she was not his possession, he would show her she was free, he would see her flash her wings.

John Donne, “Love’s Alchemy.” “Hope not for minde in women; at their best/Sweetnesse and wit, they are but Mummy, Possest.”

I’ve always hated that phrase, haven’t you, Paola, sight unseen, it’s a tautology or something near, it simply means unseen, doesn’t

the name Dahud, or Dahut, in ancient times, signified “The good sorceress.

line in Wm Shakespeare’s King Lear—“The little dogs and all—Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, see they bark at me.”

“In the nursery rhyme, of Mother Hubbard, in some versions, the Dog who finds the cupboard bare is called Dog Tray. Maybe he was truly named for that old woman’s dog, who found nothing but disappointment.

Druids believed that the spoken word was the breath of life and that writing was a form of death.

is a persistence of the ancient Celtic belief that death is simply a step—a passage—between two stages of a man’s existence. That there are many stages, and this life is one, and that many worlds exist simultaneously, round and about each other, interpenetrating perhaps here and there.

He said that the Druid religion as he understood it had a mysticism of the centre—there was no linear time, no before and after—but a still centre—and the Happy Land of Síd—which their stone corridors imitated, pointed to.

But in Brittany a man could fall down a well and find himself in a summer land

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

think uncertainty is maybe more painful than any other emotion, it both drives one on and disappoints and paralyses,

liminality.