A place does not clearly
exist for the imagination, till we have moved
elsewhere. The tenor of our experience, one day melting into another,
unifies into a single picture; out of many sunsets, many dawns, and many starry rambles, we compound a tertium quid, a glorified
quintessence; the honey of honey, the cream of cream; a classical landscape, artificially composed and far
more lively, winning and veracious than the scene it
represents.
For single glances may, indeed, be memorable; they are the traits of which we afterwards compose our
fancy likeness; but the eye cannot embrace a panorama; the eye, like the
etcher’s needle, cannot elaborate from nature; and
literature, which is the
language
of our thoughts, must be gently
elaborated in the course of time.
Hence it is that a place grows upon our fancy after we
have left it, taking more and more the colour of our predilections, growing, like our childhood, daily more beautiful through the cunning excisions of oblivion; until
it means, at last, for that inward eye of which the poet
tells us, something at once familiar and express, like
the remembered
countenance of a friend.
Robert Louis
Stevenson: Simoneau’s At Monterey, ca. 1879,first published 1966.
Francis Bacon Duo: Portrait of Lucian
Freud (above); Double Portrait of Frank
Auerbach and Lucian Freud (below).
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