It posits a belief in the advance of history and the progress of civilisation that, at the end of a tormented century, we passionately wish were true but cannot convincingly share.
He wished passionately to see it a third time".
I, too, wished passionately (and naïvely) to experience the sounds that so moved Swann, so I set down the book and took to Google, only to discover — sigh — that no such composition (or composer) ever existed.
But I wished passionately that Israel would become a democratic state for all its citizens, end the occupation, recognise the Palestinians' right of return, and acknowledge that Israel's establishment in 1948 was a Nakba, a catastrophe, for the Palestinians.
Far more than Eliot or Pound, Stevens wished passionately to be above all a poet of 20th-century America and its American English; and he had the luck, as they did not, to write with increasing genius to the end of his life.
Now in failing health, he was conscious of his own mortality and wished passionately to live long enough to complete the opera Les contes d'Hoffmann ("The Tales of Hoffmann").
I interviewed her at the time – for the Theatre Museum's Redgrave archive – and I recall her talking passionately of her wish to return to London and do more work on stage: a dream that now can never be fulfilled.
I wish I could have a lover like art, that loved me as passionately as art loves me, or who I could give as much back to".
Her apologies and vows to reform, passionately expressed, had become predictable and unconvincing, almost worse than not saying she was sorry: "Please forgive me for being such a mess sometimes, Alice," "I wish I had as much self-discipline as you have," "I am going to try to respect myself a little more, honestly," "I am sorrry — terribly sorry".
