The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?

The classics can console. But not enough.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.