David Malouf

And he says, by the time you reach your 60s, he said, you feel that, well, that's not going to get thinner and thinner.

It's going to get richer and richer because you have these more rooms that open up, which is a past to remember.

What happens when you approach 80?

Well, I think there are even more.

What I think of it, it's very easy.

I mean, memory is an extraordinary quality in us.

And it's very easy to think of memory as being leading to nostalgia.

But it doesn't necessarily have...

lead to nostalgia.

It's quite possible to think of going over something that happened to you.

And, you know, writers are very good at stepping back, not just in a kind of thin memory of the thing, but into an actual

Entering back into the space with the real light there and the real moisture of the air there or whatever it is.

And that's a bit like going back to a book that you read when you were 16 and reading it again at 60 and discovering that the book...

may be the same, but you have changed to the extent that the rereading means you see so much more.

You see so much that you missed the first time around.

And writing is a wonderful way of dealing with that because writing is the only one of the arts

where you can actually, it belongs to time, but you can stop time at any point and say, okay, something is happening here that requires me to look at this thing which happened only in two seconds over five pages because I can stop here and stop the camera and examine every little detail

that I couldn't have seen the first time around because life goes so quickly, real life.

So that going back in memory may be a more intense examination of what happened than anything you could have felt at the moment.

It's the perfect segue into one of your poems.