Tomas Virgen’s Reviews > The Prelude > Status Update

"With growing faculties she doth aspire, with faculties still growing, feeling still that whatsoever point they gain, they still have something to pursue." - !!! That's what I'm meant to do with my memories! They exist in the past, but they provide a light for the future to guide itself with. All memories are imperfect scenes of 'possible sublimity'; they serve as reminders of what I should continue aspiring to be...

"Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say, 'This portion of the river of my mind came from yon fountain?'" - the mind is a sea, and it is impossible to know the precise origins of very drop of water within it

"Already I begun to love the sun, a Boy I loved the sun..." - he loved the Sun before he knew how vital it was to life on Earth; he loved it for the beauty it created on the Earth.

"I seem two consciousnesses, conscious of myself and of some other Being." - of course I'm reminded of Pessoa and the way in which he split his consciousness, though I'm also reminded of the last book I finished ('The Double', in which our hero literally encounters another Being who encapsulates the best [or worst?] aspects of his consciousness.

"Meanwhile, my hope has been that I might fetch invigorating thoughts from former years..." - in this sense, my various journals (including the first at Merced) have all served as separate 'chapters' of my own Prelude...

"The mind of Man is framed even like the breath and harmony of music." - everything forms a part of you in the end! Moments of bliss are built upon mountains of melancholy.

"-Ah! Better far than this, to stray about voluptuously through fields and rural walks..." - These words will remain imprinted on my heart as I rest from long days and bouts of work beneath the shade of a tree or by the side of a lake...

"The Poet, gentle creature that he is, hath, like the Lover, his unruly times. He fits when he is neither sick nor well, though no distress be near him but his own unmanageable thoughts..." - I guess I am a poet after all!