Possession - A.S. Byatt (6) in Curbed (by the damn library) Annotations

"And the crystalline forms, the granite, the hornblende-schist, shone darkly with the idea that she would not write, that the Protean letter would form and reform, in her head, that it might become too late, too late for decency, absolutely too late. The other woman might die, she herself might die, they were both old and progressing towards it" (477).

"And are these places shadows of one Place? / Those trees of one Tree? And the mythic beast / A creature from the caverns of men's minds, / Or from a time when lizards walked the earth / On heavy legs as large as trees, or sprang / From bank to bank in swampy primal creeks / Where no man's foot had trod..." (279)?

"He said aloud, 'Listen to the silence.' The silence gathered thickly round his voice, so that he wondered, after all, if he had really spoken" (481).

"How true it was that one needed to be seen by others to be sure of one's own existence" (483).

"It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex....They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abime even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of good burgundy" (485).

"Think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and that the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other" (486).

"There are readings - of the same text - that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, that snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are - believe it - impersonal readings - where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hers them sing and sing. Now and then there are readings which make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge" (286-487).

Transcendent reading (we've all had this, or ought to have this, at some point in our lives): "Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash's voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader. He heard Vico saying that the first men were poets and the first words were names that were also things, and he heard his own strange, necessary meaningless lists, made in Lincoln, and saw what they were" (487).

Also: "These dead men, and Manet's wary, intelligent sensualist and Watts's prophet were all one - though also they were Manet and Watts - and the words too were one, the tree, the woman, the water, the grass, the snake and the golden apples. He had always seen these aspects as part of himself, of Roland Michell, he had lived with them. He remembered talking to Maud about modern theories of the incoherent self, which was made up of conflicting systems of beliefs, desires, languages and molecules. All and none of these were Ash and yet he knew, if he did not encompass, Ash" (487-488).

And also: "What Ash said - not to him specifically, there was no privileged communication, though it was he who happened to be there, at that time, to understand it - was that the lists were the important thing, the words that named things, the language of poetry. He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself. He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not" (488). One of those ecstatic moments when you have to stop reading and savor, reread, agree again, feel the elation of something you've wanted said finally said, wish you yourself had written it.

"Tonight, he began to think of words, words came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems, 'The Death Mask', 'The Fairfax Wall', 'A Number of Cats'. He could hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn't yet know, but which was his own. The poems were not careful observations, nor yet incantations, nor yet reflections on life and death, though they had elements of all these. He added another, 'Cats' Cradle', as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves. Tomorrow he would buy a new notebook and write them down. Tonight he would write down enough, the mnemonics. He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real" (489-490).

"In certain moods we eat our lives away / In fast successive greed; we must have more / Although that more depletes our little stock / Of time and peace remaining. We are driven / By endings as a hunger. We must know / How it comes out, the shape o' the whole, the thread / Whose links are weak or solid, intricate / Or boldly welded in great clumsy loops / Of primitive workmanship. We feel our way / Along the links and we cannot let go / Of this bright chain of curiosity / Which is become our fetter. So it drags / Us through our time - 'And then, and then, and then', / Towards our figured consummation" (491).

Also: "Do we desire / We prancing, cogitating, nervous lives / Movement's cessation or to maw crammed full / Of sweetest certainty, though with that bliss / We cease as in his thrilling bridal dance / The male wasp finds the bliss and swift surcease / Of his small time i' the air" (491).

"All History is hard facts - and something else - passion and colour lent by men" (514).

"I wonder - was my spirit rebuked by yours - as Caesar's was by Antony - or was I enlarged by your generosity as you intended? These things are all mixed and mingled - and we loved each other - for each other" (517).

"did we not - did you not flame, and I catch fire? Shall we survive and rise from our ashes" (517)?

Just a small and touching image: "Roland and Maud sat side by side on the edge of a four-poster bed, hung about with William Morris golden lilies. They looked at the photograph of Maia's wedding-day, in the light of a candle, held in a silver chamber-candlestick. Because it was hard to see, their heads were close together, dark and pale, so that they could smell each other's hair, still full of the smells of the storm, rain and troubled clay and crushed and flying leafage. And underneath that, their own particular, separate human warmths" (519).

Poor Maud: "'When I feel - anything - I go cold all over. I freeze. I can't - speak out. I'm - I'm - not good at relationships.'

She was shivering. She still looked - it was a trick of her lovely features - cool and a little contemptuous. Roland said,

'Why do you go cold?' He kept his voice gentle.

'I - I've analysed it. Because I have the sort of good looks I have. People treat you as a kind of possession if you have a certain sort of good looks. Not lively, but sort of clear-cut and -'

'Beautiful.'

'Yes, why not. You can become a property or an idol. I don't want that. It kept happening.'

'It needn't.'

'Even you - drew back - when we met. I expect that, now. I use it.'

'Yes. but you don't want - do you - to be alone always. Or do you?'

'I feel as she did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doing my work. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy. I don't want to think of that going. You understand?'

'Oh yes.'

'I write about liminality. Thresholds. Bastions. Fortresses.'

'Invasion. Interruption.'

'Of course.'

'It's not my scene. I have my own solitude.'

'I know. You - you would never - blur the edges messily -'

'Superimpose -'

'No, that's why I -'

'Feel safe with me -'

'Oh no. Oh no. I love you. I think I'd rather I didn't.'

'I love you,' said Roland. 'It isn't convenient. Not now I've acquired a future. But that's how it is. In the worst way. All the things we - we grew up not believing in. Total obsession, night and day. When I see you, you look alive and everything else - fades. All that.'" (520-521). Trying not to be weepy because I'm very much in public.

"In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. it was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful" (522). Perfect.

"There are things which happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been. Two people met, on a hot May day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was" (523). I knew Ash had to meet his daughter. I knew he needed it. And I can't believe it's finished.