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Calcutta - 1979

"There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, and inequalities of memory, then [sic.] in any other or our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak - and at others again, so tyrannic so beyond control! - We are to be sure a miracle everyday - but our powers of recollection and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out."

p. 222 Mansfield Park - Jane Austen (Penguin)

"There is a part of everything which is unexposed, because we are unaccustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the things we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown. We must find it."

Flaubert in a letter to Maupassant