An unusual way to capture ever-present memories, likening them to pigeons underfoot in the Piazza San Marco, cooing and strutting in ‘honey-voiced congregations’. And the quiet connection between his memories and his life is arresting.
‘These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me. Like the pigeons in St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder.’
Source: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 (1945)), p. 215
