I love the word ‘hoard’, in the sense of a bardic ‘word-hoard’, or here, a hoard of observations you stash in the cupboard of the imagination, a mind-hoard.  And I like the absolution from having to understand those bright-shining things you pick up on your life’s walk, when you add them to the haul.

… there is no end to that which,

not understood, may yet be noted

and hoarded in the imagination …

Let the understanding, if it is to come at all, seep into you by their mere storied presence.

And here, another form of exuberant hoarding from Molly Peacock’s life-enhancing biography of Mary Delany, which we celebrate here.  

Source: Thomas Kinsella, ‘Hen Woman’, quoted in Seamus Heaney, Finders Keepers: Selected prose 1971-2001 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 243

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