touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
There is an untranslatable Italian word for the mental bank account you acquire by memorizing poetry: it is gazofilacio. Contini believed that an accumulation of such treasure would eventually prove its worth even if it had to begin with sweated labor.
It was the universal conversation, conducted through memory. . . . Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade.
—Clive James
Cultural Amnesia (2007)
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