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.
If any era should be aware of the temptations to rewrite history, it is our own.
It's often the material things that provide the essence of memory.
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.