"Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go."

Tim Peters

"The model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against stubborn resistance.  Everything was slightly out of scale, all angles slightly out of true.  The staircase was steeper, the landing pokier, the lavatory window looked out not on to the road, as I thought it should, but back across the fields.  I experienced a sense of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape.  Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers.  Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go.  The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend."

     John Banville, The sea (London:  Picador, 2005), 156-157.