… the historian Maya Jasanoff observes that "Erasing history' is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn't erasing history; it's revising cultural priorities … Burning documents: now that's erasing history."

In her diary, [Woolf] recollects Strachey saying at some point, "We can only live if we see through illusion," a statement whose phrasing she finds incommensurate with the space it occupies in her mind. It is not only his words she finds there, she explains: "This saying of Lytton's has always come pictorially, with heat, flowers, grass, summer, &

[Virginia Woolf] even wrote of words as moths, noting how in daily life "[W]e refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die."

… Woolf knew… that the brain and the page are also real places. One moves through life composing, not copy, but the sentences through which the world and one's heart become known.

POETS LOVE WALTER BENJAMIN. He often wrote criticism and philosophy as if they were poetry, gathering strange assemblances, making associative leaps, and turning his attention to objects others may have viewed as of little significance.

For there she was.

For it was a snail.

The for operated in my mind as the fixation point (often a small black square) that researchers use to anchor the centers of images to help them investigate the visual phenomenon of what they call "binocular rivalry."

A garden was among the first examples Foucault gave when he was developing his concept of heterotopia —a space that is apart from but nonetheless shaped by the society that made it. (Some others: a library, a ship, a prison.) A heterotopia, he wrote, must be entered ritually…

Once, in Florence, practicing her craft in her travel diary, Woolf reminded herself of the dangers of description: "What one records is really the state of one's own mind." I do love to be one; it is my favorite pronoun. It conjures me up, over there, where I can see myself, like a word tried out upon the page. One has arrived at the gate to Knole.

In groups of people, particularly of family, my mind can sometimes feel like a garden wilting in relentless sun. I need solitude, or movement, or ideally both to restore my thoughts to their unshriveled state.