And then I remembered a quotation from Cassandra at the Wedding , which I read seven years ago. And of course I’d put it on here. So I found this old dear old thing again, how wet behind the ears. There I am, young self: voluble, enthusiastic. I miss old credulities. It’s time to bring this thing out of the closet and into the end of this decade. To tell that old self: I am reading Savage Detectives again, after all these years.
We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
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