Two Fragments to Mr. Delaney (From Mr. Lanny)

To you the Muse this Verse bestows,
Which might as well have been in Prose;
No Thought, no Fancy, no Sublime,
But simple Topicks told in Rime.

-Jonathan Swift

The car becomes all of a sudden a gauche relic of another world. A preglacial monstrosity with its sweaty stink of petrol, and hot injections of oil on air so pure. We ditch it in a gravel pit and run out together, hand in hand, spontaneously, down the slopes past the Duke of Cumberland. Yes, downhill in a kind of hectic nympholepsy, the grass snapping at our ankles, the clouds deafening us, and the distant cathedral spire swimming up as if to impale us. The seven winds drummed while we were coming. Now they are silent. Are ears are alert, twisted into little helices of attention, but the valley offers no sound. It lies there like a toy.

-Lawrence Durrell