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14th century italian poetry

    The Game of Favourites

    I no longer trust the urge to classify. Still, now and then, a fragment or scene from a book returns with unexpected force. I wonder whether the books that occupy this not entirely mental space are the ones we might call favourites. Recognition does not always imply affection. One looks for patterns—certainly for narratives that hesitate, or seem unsure of their own necessity. Writing that maintains a distance, even as it draws you in. This evening I found myself circling the question of favourites again. New shelves arrive tomorrow. As I removed books from storage, I felt that familiar longing to discard all but what might be essential. Just a small shelf of favourites. King Lear, always Beckett’s “Trilogy”, no The Divine Comedy, yes Herodotus, yes The Lighthouse, no Proust, maybe Pilgrimage, probably My Struggle, yes Dickinson, yes Ulysses, no Tristram Shandy, yes Septology, no What endures in a long list of other works is something more elusive. A tone, perhaps, or a current of thought that bypasses intellect and settles somewhere harder to name. A voice that feels intimate. A world built not on detail but on atmosphere. With thanks to an eudaemonist.

    From Softness to Plumes

    The residua of reading. Prince Palador in John Ford’s The Lover’s Melancholy, inspired by Burton’s Anatomy, always a skimmer away. Now, unearthly Cato, among the saved despite suicide and paganism, warden of Purgatory, un veglio solo (an old man alone)—a metaphor for the journey from fallen condition, from old man to pristine restoration, to prelapsarian innocence prior to entering Eden. Cato, watchdog to the purgatorial isle, delayed until Judgment Day—his suicide, too, a stage in the journey from old to new man. Residua also from Wim Wenders’ extraordinary Perfect Days, a bliss of contemplation. Life on earth as purgatorial, living in the caesura (as Cato did not). From Ford’s The Lady’s Trial: “Now the down / of softness is exchanged for the plumes of age.” On the path to the last decade of Senettute (Convivio, IV. xxiv, 1-6).

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