reading: Eric Ambler, Epitaph for a Spy
Sayyid Qtub, Milestones
(stopped reading Kwinter also)

thinking of novel to be called Chronicle of Jehan.

Thinking there must be more to be thought about origin of poetry at the threshold of adulthood, when childhood is already a memory, & fictions are subject to disenchantment. Moment of premonition. intimations of (im)mortality.

sense that the artist has one song, subject to endless variation. inimitable. not so much a style as a moment of stillness, awareness, premonition. not mechanical surrealism ("fancy"), but still off the edge because emerging from so far down in the brain or heart. hobo song. duende.

song as swelling of the heart & premonition of death. feeling of fate. amor fatum(?) nothing to be done, only celebrate what you sense to the end. Auden's inner landscape that every poet carries around.

ultimate disenchantment. time only a moment & every person a world. the singer standing there singing, while fictions crumble & dissolve.