Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.

I think about the kinds of gardens that Queen Elizabeth put up. She made gardens in the shape of an "E," for Elizabeth, just one more way in which she used symbolism to solidify her reign: appearing as the Virgin Queen, for example, or wearing a dress embroidered with eyes and ears to indicate that she knew all that was going on in her castle; she had spies.

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

I'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.