"It sometimes seemed as if the author of the Book of Fish, the storyteller William Buelow Gould, had been born with a memory but neither experience nor history to account for it and had spent forever after seeking to invent what didn't exist in the curious belief that his imagination might become his experience, and thereby both explain and cure his problem of an inconsolable memory."
Gould's Book of Fish, Richard Flanagan
"I shall be left with the inconsolable memory; Of the treasure I went into the forest to find And never found, and which was not there And is perhaps not anywhere? But if not anywhere Why do I feel guilty at not having found it?" T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
