'Capricious and Leaking'

“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.” The Irish critic Robert Lynd (1879-1949) is writing in the title essay of his 1921 collection The Pleasures of…