Possession - A.S. Byatt (3) in Curbed (by the damn library) Annotations

Reminds me of Aaron's butterfly metaphor for young, impressionable girls: "Here is a Riddle, Sir, an old Riddle, an easy Riddle - hardly worth your thinking about - a fragile Riddle, in white and Gold with life in the middle of it. There is a gold, soft cushion, whose gloss you may only paradoxically imagine with your eyes closed tight - see it feelingly, let it slip through your mind's fingers. And this gold cushion is enclosed in its own crystalline casket, a casket translucent and endless in its circularity, for there are no sharp corners to it, no protrusions, only a milky moonstone clarity that deceives. And these are wrapped in silk, fine as thistledown, tough as steel, and the silk lies inside Alabaster, which you may think of as a funerary Urn - only with no inscription, for there are as yet no Ashes - and no pediment, and no nodding poppies engraved, nor yet no lid you may lift to peep in for all is sealed and smooth. There may come a day when you may lift the lid with impunity - or rather, when it may be lifted from within - for that way, life may come - whereas your way - you will discover - only Congealing and Mortality. An Egg, Sir, is the answer, as you perspicuously read from the beginning, an Egg, a perfect O, a living Stone, doorless and windowless, whose life may slumber on till she be Waked - or find she has Wings to spread - which is not so here - oh no - An Egg is my answer. What is the Riddle? I am my own riddle. Oh, Sir, you must not kindly seek to ameliorate or steal away my solitude. It is a thing we women are taught to dread - oh the terrible tower, oh the thickets round it - no companionable Nest - but a donjon. But they have lied to us you know, in this, as in so much else. The Donjon may frown and threaten - but it keeps us very safe - within its confines we are free in a way you, who have freedom to range the world, do not need to imagine. I do not advise imagining it - but do me the justice of believing - not imputing mendacious protestation - my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have. I hesitate to go out. If you opened the little gate, I would not hop away - but oh how I sing in my gold cage - Shattering an Egg is unworthy of you, no Pass time for men. Think what you would have in your hand if you put forth your Giant strength and crushed the solid stone. Something slippery and cold and unthinkably disagreeable" (142).

"As for Fergus. as for Fergus. He had a habit which Maud was not experienced enough to recognise as a common one in ex-lovers of giving little tugs at the carefully severed spider-threads or puppet-strings which had once tied her to him" (145).

"I find I am at ease with other imagined minds - bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole vanished men of other times, hair teeth, fingernails, porringer, bench, wineskin, church, temple, synagogue and the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull - making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seems important that these other lives of mine should span many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch. For all I am is a nineteenth-century gentleman plumb in the midst of smoky London - and what is peculiar to him is to know just how much stretches away from his vanishing pin-point of observation - before and after - whilst all the time he is what he is, with his whiskered visage and his shelves full of Plato and Feuerbach, St Augustine and John Stuart Mill" (163).

"Eros is a bad and fickle little godhead" (168).

"I go too fast. And I cannot, I must not, burden you with a complete confession of what are in any case a very confused, very incoherent, indeed inchoate set of ideas, perceptions, half-truths, useful fictions, struggled for and not possessed" (170). But then you'd end up saying so little, dearie.

"...we live in an old world - a tired world - a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning - by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos - are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision - as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one - or, we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient minsters and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress" (170).

"Now I am not saying - Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or any such quibble. I am saying that without the Maker's imagination nothing can live for us - whether alive or dead, or once alive and now dead, or waiting to be brought to life....Tell me you know - and that it is not simple - or simply to be rejected - there is a truth of Imagination" (175).

"your world is haunted by voiceless shapes...and wandering Passions...and little fluttering Fears" (183).