Giovanni Lacinio, Examining the bones of the dead King, Pretiosa margarita novella, 1546
My copy of Thomas James' book Letters To A Stranger finally arrived, so I've finally let myself read this one. Stunning.
““I hope […] mostly to adjust the balance between the livingness and the lastingness of poetry. Both of those qualities are important, but it’s my strong belief that the invention of writing has given a little bit too much power to the lastingness of poetry. We tend to assume that the good poems are the ones that last, but of course poems also need to live, and one of the requirements of living is dying, i.e. vanishing.””
— Alice Oswald, The Art of Erosion
oppian was living in exile when he wrote this.
"The Lobster again holds in his heart a love exceeding and unspeakable for his own lair and he never leaves it willingly, but if one drag him away by force and let him go again in the sea, in no long time he returns to his own cleft eagerly, and will not choose a strange retreat nor does he heed any other rock but seeks the home that he left and his native haunts and his feeding-ground in the brine which fed him before, and leaves not the sea from which seafaring fishermen estranged him. Thus even to the swimming tribes their own house and their native sea and the home place where they were born instil in their hearts a sweet delight, and it is not to mortal men only that their fatherland is dearest of all; and there is nothing more painful or more terrible thenº when a man perforce lives the grievous life of an exile from his native land, a stranger among aliens bearing the yoke of dishonour."
The only reason we know about the 14th/15th century mystic, Margery Kempe, is because the book she dictated about her life and visions was re-discovered accidentally in the 1930s, when guests at a country house were looking in the cupboards for spare ping pong balls.
