Poetry speaks to you either at first sight or not at all. A flash of revelation and a flash of response. - J. M. Coetzee

There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas

Seen from too remote a vantage, life begins to lose its particularity. All shipwrecks become the same shipwreck, all castaways the same castaway, sunburnt, lonely, clad in the skins of the beast he has slain.

But he cannot see a connection between the end of yearning and the end of poetry. Is that what growing up amounts to: growing out of yearning, of passion, of all intensities of the soul?