Viscountess Jocelyn, “Interior of Room” (ca. 1862)
“What has all my Existence been since then but an Amo te Solo…”
— Coleridge, Notebooks, III
Amo te Solo
Tag: Diary
“Does the past live with me alone?”
Nationaal Archief, “Presents at the top of a car” (detail)
His Notebooks, increasingly filled with intricate technical speculations on science and theology, lose much of their intimacy. But, at least until 1820, they are also far less painful and unhappy, apart from the occasional visitation of the ghosts and wolves of memory and loss.
In December 1816, after a long metaphysical speculation on “the three Protoplasms, or primary Forms” of Gravity, Light and Water, he suddenly stopped short and wrote:
“ASRA. Written as of yore. Christmas 1816. ASRA. Does the Past live with me alone? Coleridge.”
— Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections
A Voice of One’s Own
“Have you noticed a change in Steve?”
Eastman Kodak Company, “How to make good movies…” (1938)
“Have you noticed a change in Steve?
Boy, I have!
Oh, It’s wonderful, I’ll tell ya!”
–Entry from girl’s diary (ca. 1961) quoted in Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries
“Lay long with pleasure talking with my wife…”
“Lay long with pleasure talking with my wife, in whom I never had greater content, blessed be God! than now…”
—The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday, November 2, 1662
John Sapiro 