Portraits

What I did not know when I was very young was that nothing can take the past away: the past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Melville in a letter to Hawthorne, June 1851

I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian Pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, it developed itself, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I. Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.

On being 20

I remember myself at that age, and I think I was a really horrible person— and all my friends were horrible too. It’s a really bad age for men.