Cirrus@Austlit

'Returning to my home town again in my mind, preparatory to returning in my body, I find not unpredictably or indeed unexpectedly that I hold off. Is it that having explored it already, thought about it so much when I lived there and knew nowhere else, I have written all I would ever want to write, having recalled all I would ever want to record? Or is it that there are unrecorded but not unrecallable episodes, things I should yet look into? The old familiar tautening of the stomach muscles. But the stabs and jabs of pain, are they just the splinters from scraping the barrel and a sign it’s time to move on, but I have moved on, now I’ve moved back? Or are these the jabs of pain and tenderness of the as yet unrecorded episodes of trauma and angst and ill-repressed horror? Of course I could return looking for happy stories, comic stories, and then it would just be the pain of laughing.' (Introduction) 

'So I go to see my aunt to say goodbye again, she is ninety and this could be the last goodbye, my mother has been saying this for twenty years now, it might be the last time you see her, and it never is, but one time it will be, and she tells me the same stories again that I never listen to, having heard them so many times with deaf ears, refusing to listen to their insistent message.' (Introduction)