All human beings, Hazlitt argued, have the capacity to both reason and imagine, and these abilities should not be regarded as separate. Nor should one be favoured over the other. They are complementary; the passions must bow to the moderating influence of reason, just as reason must not overlook the truth that is revealed by the passions.

Da Ponte, dear friend and collaborator, finder of words for me, this is the letter I shall never write and have always been addressing to you, my side of a conversation that has been in progress since we first began, always faintly to be heard under the music I found to fit your words, or rather, in the gap, which is not always silence, where words and music fail, and must always fail, to connnect; in our case an attempt to move between Italy and our more sober North as if there were no Alps to cross.

It is reasonably safe to predict that the activities of reading, studying, writing and publishing literary fiction will increasingly become the preserve of a rump of ‘true believers’.

It comes back to me that I married K. because he whistled Bach perfectly – that was, as I remember, the reason I gave myself and others. It’s as good a basis as any for marriage and I was not disappointed.

Who am I? Where do I come from? The answers to these questions are dependant less upon a place and more upon an idea, an image, a dish, according to Allen S. Weiss.

Basket

Editor

Designer

HEAT 12. Ten Years

Contents

Non-fiction

Not Exactly Non-Fiction

Poetry

Art

Reviews

Related Content

Fire from the FlintWilliam Hazlitt and the Art of the Essay

Mozart to da PonteWords and Music

The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing

Journal 2004–2005

Fragments of an Autobiography in a Stuffed Cabbage

Editor

Designer

HEAT 12. Ten Years

Contents

Non-fiction

Not Exactly Non-Fiction

Poetry

Art

Reviews

Related Content

Related Titles