A.

A dream of the fields

Surely the primary, survival-effective uses of language involve stating alternatives and hypotheses. We don’t, we never did, go about making statements of act to other people, or in our internal discourse with ourselves. We talk about what may be, or what we’d like to do, or what we ought to do, or what might have happened: warnings, suppositions, propositions, invitations, ambiguities, analogies, hints, lists, anxieties, hearsay, old wives’ tales, leaps and cross-links and spiderwebs between here and there, between then and now, between now and sometime, a continual weaving and restructuring of the remembered and the perceived and the imagined, including a great deal of wishful thinking and a variable quantity of deliberate or non-deliberate fictionalizing, to reassure ourselves or for the pleasure of it, and also some deliberate or semi-deliberate falsification in order to mislead a rival or persuade a friend or escape despair; and so sooner have we made one of these patterns of words than we may, like Shelley’s cloud, laugh, and arise, and unbuild it again.

"You have bewitched me body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. And wish from this day forth never to be parted from you."