Tom

“If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis. This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. ‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“These are the thoughts
of all men in all ages and lands,
they are not original with me.

If they are not yours as much as mine
they are nothing or next to nothing,
if they do not enclose everything
they are next to nothing,
if they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle
they are nothing.

If they are not just as close as they are distant
they are nothing.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“I have embraced you and henceforth possess you to myself, and when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself