In the White Lily you are met by a panoply of voices mourning death, ululating loneliness, apostrophes to absent loves, memoirs of desire and despair, celebrations of beauty. To read them-or more accurately, to hear them-we submit ourselves to experiences we could access no other way. Like visions of melting glaciers, what follows are vanishing emotional landscapes. They will never be seen again. They are memories, desires, wounds-each one inimitable. No sourcerer can conjure them back into existence. If raising them from the dead were possible, it would be the loss of beauty and not the...