Sublime

That formidable head is where my mother houses all her conscious memories. A complex stellar skein spun from infancy to old age. The images are manifold, encompassing her ancestors and her descendants. We all constellate in that brain of hers and we endure, shining on, because she sustains us. At her age, the exercise of memory is hard work. Summon

It’s 20 May 2008 off the coast of the Bahamas. I am a trainee shark wrangler and currently have over a hundred of them circling me as I float on the ocean bed watching my mentor feed, study and inspect each one. His name was Jeremiah Sullivan and, fortunately for me, he was one of the world’s leading shark experts.

We have never before suspected that memory loss could be fatal. Or at least I never suspected it. I’ve always taken it as more of a metaphor. A person suddenly realizes how much memory they are carrying around in their body, wittingly and unwittingly, on all levels. The way that cells reproduce is also memory. A kind of bodily, cellular, tissue mem

He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. So unlike other people. Frighteningly unlike! Later, in his cotton fields, he had them whipped and then made them go back to work and thought, They can’t possibly feel as we do. You can whip them and they go back to work. And having

Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for the sake of variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander.