ABSTRACT
Reflecting on memory in The Crystal Cabinet, as she recalls her loneliness at St Andrews, Butts writes:
It was as though something out of the past, something which I thought had let me go, had come out of a dark and was upon me again. Like a traveller by night in a forest, with a beast on his track that had followed him a long way, and he thought he had given it the slip, and now, much further on, he hears behind him its feet and its breath. […]
I sat at my table, looking out through the winter branches, into the dark that held the Harbour with the living tide for bloodstream and pulse. One of those hours – I used to have them – when something of my future and my past seemed to meet, in a present that was more than present, and with it went the sense of a vast fate, waiting for the world and for me round the next corner in space. (For, like the man in The Moon Endureth, space always seemed to be full of paths and corridors, loops and pools and depths and heights – that birds perhaps and cats had more knowledge of than we). 1
