It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.
If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.
Nostalgic memory is a sudden encounter with the thingness of the thing that has been forgotten, not the continuous desire for possessions, whether past, present, or future.
If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal...
Prospero is man-the-artist, or man-the-scholar: Ariel and Caliban represent his ethereal and material selves—the one airy, imaginative, and swift; the second earthy, gross, and appetitive.
But if we create our own Shakespeare, it is at least as true that the Shakespeare we create is a Shakespeare that has, to a certain extent, created us.