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aspidistra.
For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.
Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.
This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better. A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.
Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.
cailleach
Religio Medici
Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.
again. ‘I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.’ ‘Mrs McNulty, that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory.’
This goes to prove yet again that few people stick to the articles of their characters, and will keep breaking away from them.
But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.
Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don’t belong there.