"The piece wasn’t going well and I sympathized when I came across Lear’s plea to William Holman Hunt for painterly guidance: “If you cannot tell me how the shadows of the blessed jackdaws will fall I don’t know what I shall do.” Coincidentally—or, not uncoincidentally—he spoke elsewhere 
of being in a state of “knowingnothingatallaboutwhatoneisgoingtodo-ness.” I took this as a cue—and an excuse: the essay would be “about” not knowing what one is about. Pleased that I now had a subject, I stopped writing and went for a run." Matthew Bevis Poetry

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