"Beauty and history were not so much related in my mind, as they were the same thing, the thing I wanted and had at the time no name for. They were metaphor. I had to have beauty, I had to have history: they transformed. Later I had to have poetry for the same reason. The hunger for metaphor is surprisingly ferocious. Language, which is a warehouse that displays our desires without guile, proves that it is so. 'What was it like?' we say when we really want to know the truth of something. We don't say, 'What is it?' What it is is nothing, is hardly the point. What it is like -- that is the metaphoric reality, the ripple of seemingly discrete things into each other, the field theory of life, of transformation. And that, we sense -- language senses -- is it." (p.92-93, A Romantic Education, 1981)
