My life’s paper trail was longer than I’d imagined. Culling it is no small challenge | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Mon, 14/12/2020 - 3:30am

It had sat, a perpetual fire hazard I’m sure, in seven or eight boxes in our roof. What to keep? Why?

In the end I couldn’t toss out my mother’s old exercise books filled with her adolescent writing about spirituality, Romantic poetry and the great 18th and 19th century novelists.

This morning I rescued them from the garbage bag where I put them yesterday during the beginning of an ongoing cull of my personal archive.

Robert Burns – PASSION

Burns found release in the emotion of love. [He] began with romantic and innocent love affairs [and] later became a rake – gave rise to a double conflict with society and himself ... Burns rebelled against accepted morality, but he was a chivalrous, tender (?) man – therefore he was continually at war with himself.

With Fielding we are breaking new ground. He is an artist in a sense in which Defoe and Richardson were not.