A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, [human], as if the pleasure were one thing and th ememory another. It's all one thing. [...] What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure. [...] The other is ony the beginning of it. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. But still we know very little about it. What it will be as I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in this world. Do they not teach you this? [...] And indeed, the poem is a good example.
For the most splendid line becomes fully splendid only by means of all the lines after it; if you went back to it you would find it less splendid than you thought. You would kill it. I mean in a poem. (p73)
Out of the Silent Planet
C.S.Lewis, 1965
image source:
Uroboros Engraving by Natale Bonifacio
Delle allvsioni, imprese, et emblemi del Sig. Principio Fabricii da Teramo sopra la vita, opere, et attioni di Gregorio XIII pontefice massimo (1588)
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