"Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory"
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Romance, Curtis suggests, isn’t a possession so much as a misdirection. Calling it “like a ghost” does more than decorate the sentence; it indicts romance as a phenomenon that can be sensed, narrated, even chased, but never pinned down in the present tense. The line “always where you are not” turns longing into a coordinate system: romance thrives in absence, in the imagined room next door, in the version of events that didn’t happen but could have. Touching would make it real, and real would make it ordinary.
That second sentence sharpens the trick. An “interview or conversation” is “prose at the time” because living is logistical: you’re listening for meaning, watching the clock, reading the room. Only later does memory re-edit the mundane into “poetry,” trimming awkward pauses, adding rhythm, assigning symbolism. Curtis is exposing a soft lie we tell ourselves: that the past was more coherent, more fated, more lyrical than it felt while we were inside it.
Context matters. Curtis, a nineteenth-century American essayist steeped in genteel Romantic sensibilities, is writing from a culture that prized refinement, courtship, and the polished afterimage of experience. His subtext is both wistful and skeptical: the sweetest part of romance may be its refusal to arrive on schedule. What we call “romantic” is often a collaboration between desire and hindsight, with memory doing the final, flattering draft.
That second sentence sharpens the trick. An “interview or conversation” is “prose at the time” because living is logistical: you’re listening for meaning, watching the clock, reading the room. Only later does memory re-edit the mundane into “poetry,” trimming awkward pauses, adding rhythm, assigning symbolism. Curtis is exposing a soft lie we tell ourselves: that the past was more coherent, more fated, more lyrical than it felt while we were inside it.
Context matters. Curtis, a nineteenth-century American essayist steeped in genteel Romantic sensibilities, is writing from a culture that prized refinement, courtship, and the polished afterimage of experience. His subtext is both wistful and skeptical: the sweetest part of romance may be its refusal to arrive on schedule. What we call “romantic” is often a collaboration between desire and hindsight, with memory doing the final, flattering draft.
Quote Details
| Topic | Romantic |
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